The Wind & The Wave
by The Very Last Valkyrie
Summary: AU. The intern and the attending: what they were, what they are, what they will be. Jackson's past has just caught up with him, and April's is hot on her heels.
1. Scratch

**_I am indebted to Kate (_averybody _on Tumblr) for sending me the prompt which inspired The Wind & The Wave. She only has herself to blame._**

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><p><strong>1. Scratch<strong>

It's going to be a bad day.

I knew it was going to be a bad day when I rolled out of bed at four-oh-one AM and dinged my face on a copy of Julia Child's _Mastering the Art of French Cooking_. My mom sent it to me in her last care package, fully aware it would have no effect on my eating habits but hoping all the same. I knew it was going to be a bad day when I woke up at six thirty-seven (after making the smart decision to pick myself up off the floor and climb back into bed at four-oh-four AM), and realised I was going to be late for pre-rounds. I know it's going to be a bad day because it's six forty-nine and I'm hunting through the kitchen cabinets, searching for a Band-Aid to cover the fresh bruise on my forehead (thanks a bunch, Julia Child) instead of eating the waffles my roommate Reed got up at six-oh-five to make.

Since she thought she I'd already left, she has half a waffle clamped experimentally between her teeth when I walk into the kitchen. When she notes my expression, the time and the bruise on my forehead, she pops her lips, and her waffle lands neatly on the blue-patterned plate she must've set out for the purpose. Any other day, a display of breakfast food-based awesome like that would at least merit a smile, but today is going to be a bad day, so I ignore the awesome, and slap the ancient Band-Aid I find over my bruise without appreciating how much that's going to hurt.

Today is going to be a very bad day.

In the hospital parking lot, I waste five precious seconds checking out my reflection in the rear-view. I angle the mirror down and try to arrange my hair over what my mom (and Julia Child, most likely) would call 'the boo-boo'. I can cover about two thirds of it, and it's not like anyone's going to be looking too closely at my forehead anyway, since I don't have a mystical third eye they might need to stare down, or an enormous zit they might need to stare at.

There's a tap on the driver's side window, and I jump. My hand slips from my face, my elbow hits exactly the wrong spot, and the horn blares.

Stephanie Edwards waves from the other side of the glass, her hair glossy, her lipstick glossy, and worst of all, her forehead flawless.

"Hi!" I blurt, before I remember she can't hear me. Her gleaming smile doesn't waver as she turns away, gliding across the parking lot, picking her perfect way between the puddles in gleaming high-heeled leather boots.

And I have a Band-Aid on my forehead.

There's nobody left in the locker room as I hurriedly change into my scrubs, probably because they're all on pre-rounds, probably answering questions about patients whose surgeries they'll probably get to scrub in on, probably because they didn't fall out of bed at four-oh-one AM. Reed's working the night shift, but George and Lexie and Trina and David and Doug will have been here early, or stayed overnight to ensure they're not the one still trying to tie the drawstring on their pants and call the elevator at the same time.

They're not the one becoming stiller than a statue when the doors finally do open, and standing against the back wall is an attending surgeon, his arms folded casually across his chest, his legs casually crossed at the ankle. He raises his head, and he sees me, and he goes still too.

_**Then**_

_"So, I don't usually do…that." April scuffed her toe of her sneaker against the bottom stair. She was young – how young, he wondered, twenty-four, twenty-five? – and her cheeks and chin were still rounded._

_Young, but old enough, and an unexpected development._

_"You said that, actually."_

_"I know, but –"_

_"You said that a lot, actually." She'd _never_ done that, actually, and he wished she'd told him. He was glad she hadn't, though, or they wouldn't have, and that first sideways glance she'd given him from under her long, long lashes would've gone to waste. That look was the first thing to happen to Jackson in Seattle that hadn't made him want to turn tail and flee back to New York: to his brownstone, to his practice, to clearer skies and more crowded bars._

_"I'm not going out with you!"_

_"Did I ask you to go out with me?"_

_Why hadn't he asked her to go out with him, more to the point? He'd already seen more of her than anybody other than her gynaecologist had seen of her, and he'd seemed to – not that she cared, of course. He was just a guy._

_A guy who she now knew was named Jackson Avery, Doctor, a guy who looked like he was doing his damnedest not to laugh at her._

_"As you were, Doctor Kepner."_

_Just a guy, in a whole hospital full of guys._

_So April didn't care._

_At _all_._

_**Now**_

I walk forward because I don't have a choice, because I'm an adult, and that's what adults do. I walk forward until I'm a foot or so inside the elevator, and then I turn my back, and then I press the button for my floor. I feel…pain, would be accurate. The feeling is bittersweet, to have him so close and so far away from me, to know that really, he's as far away from me as the Sun from the Earth. He told me he was just a guy in a bar, and I said I was just a girl in a bar, and we were both lying. I asked him to choose me, to choose to give me a reason to never love anybody else, to give up Matthew and Stephanie and just be April and Jackson, just a guy and a girl who met in a bar and shared a bed and ate cereal out of the same box and did all the things people in love do when they're just that to each other – just that, and nothing more.

And he said no. He didn't say it in so many words, but I heard him.

I sat on that same barstool in that same bar all night, shelling peanuts and not eating them, because I honestly believed that love would find a way.

I'm trying, right now, I'm trying really hard not to raise my hand when they ask who wants to be on his service, and not to go to the coffee cart at the same time he does, and not to be trapped in an elevator with him, breathing his air. I can feel his eyes on the back of my neck, and Jackson's eyes are the reason I took a second peek at him when he sat down beside me at Joe's that first time, and they are hard eyes to ignore.

There are a lot of things about Jackson which are hard to ignore (and his girlfriend is one of them).

"I miss you."

Pain is accurate. Pain is a wound with ragged edges, a hole that has no chance of healing when I have to share elevators with him, when I have to breathe his air. Pain is the bruise on my forehead, the thud of my blood against it, the dull beat of my heart because this is nothing new, this pain, and pain is supposed to pass with time, but it doesn't seem to be getting any better.

When I was eighteen, I thought love was a boy named Matthew. We'd dated all through high school, we dated through my pre-med, and we were engaged by med school. I thought love was candy hearts on Valentine's Day and chaste kisses that were never anywhere above or below my cheeks and my mouth, that never penetrated any deeper than the first layer of skin. I thought love was the memory of the entire contents of my burrito sliding out one end and splattering in my lap, and him standing outside the door while I showered and then wrapping me in his football jersey and then ordering pizza. I thought love was being told you were beautiful, the same word, over and over, with the promise of a white picket fence and a house with a yard and a dog and babies someday – and then I skipped out on the mixer Seattle Grace organised to acclimatise the interns to each other before we started climbing over one another to get the best shifts, the best surgeries, the attention of the best attendings. I walked into the bar across the street, and I ordered the first whisky of my life (surgical interns don't mix diet soda with their liquor), and half an hour later, he sat down beside me.

He was wearing a grey button-down, buttoned up all the way, and an expensive watch, and most college guys aren't interested in the small-town med student with the out-of-town boyfriend who still occasionally wears her hair in braids, so I didn't think he would be either.

"Hi."

I didn't answer. I snuck a peek, in case the face attached to the unfamiliar voice _was_ familiar, but he was staring at me, so I dropped my gaze back to my drink. It was his eyes that made me look again, though: his eyes are hot green, the kind of colour you never see, and they were still staring at me.

"You're ignoring me." It sounded like that sounded funny to him.

"You're going to make some joke that I'm the butt of," I informed my whisky. "Or you've made a bet with your friends that you can get the redhead at the bar up on the bar, but I'm not in the mood for dancing tonight, and I wouldn't dance on a bar even if I was."

"So you're ignoring me."

"So I'm ignoring you."

"I don't have a joke." His drink, scotch with no rocks, arrived without him seeming to have asked for it. "And I don't have any friends, so you shouldn't ignore me."

"Why not?"

"Because otherwise I'm going to spend the night sitting here alone, flirting with the spot where you used to be."

His handsome, I couldn't ignore. The warm colour of his skin, the freckles across his nose, the slightly downward slope of his brows were all pretty in a way that could only be saved by the strong shape of his jaw, by the light stubble and the football player's shoulders. The way his eyes are the kind of colour you don't see, he's the kind of attractive you don't see, not if you've spent the last gosh knows how many years in a library, or a church, or on a farm. Since he wasn't acting like somebody who wanted to serial kill me and wear my scalp as a hat, I took a chance.

I laughed, and I listened, and I talked, and later, I let him take me home.

It wasn't that I'd never been with anybody like him before, anybody that little bit older and wiser – it was that I'd never been with _anybody_ before. I couldn't be sure why it was him, why he was the one who got further than that first layer of skin, but it was right, and he was right. He was careful, and exhaustive, and so careful with me, with his fingertips and his lips and his teeth and the whole long length of that body that it only would've been right with him, and there was no need to know why.

So people who believe time can both make wine better and pain easier are kidding themselves.

I sense Jackson straightening up, peeling himself away from the wall, responding, although he doesn't tell me so. The air is warmer when he stands behind me, close enough that his breath moves the hair by my ear. He must be able to smell my conditioner. He must be able to hear my heartbeat, and even if he can't, there's no way he can kid himself it's slow and steady, because even hate would quicken the pace, and I do hate him, and that doesn't make this easier either.

His lips touch my hair the second before he pulls away.

"I can't."

And thank God his floor is first, and that he doesn't turn back to me, because I'm new at this, and I'm still learning how not to show him just how much it hurts.

_**~#~**_

"You need me to kill him for you?"

This is hilarious, because Lexie weighs all of fifty pounds, and she's concentrating so hard on getting her glare right that her eyebrows and her cheekbones are practically meeting in the middle.

"Because I will," she goes on, suddenly cheerful, suddenly Lexie again. "I'll kill him, and George will bury the body, and then we'll all dance around the grave – only it won't technically be a grave, since no one but us will know he's there – and salt the earth so nothing will ever grow where he lies – except that might give away where he is, so maybe we won't do that – but I'll kill him for you if you need me to."

George, who's eating a banana, nods. Nodding is all he's going to do, firstly because his mouth is full, and secondly because he's scrubbing in a corrective jaw surgery with the head of plastics later, and the head of plastics is Jackson, and Jackson will use the telepathic powers George genuinely appears to believe he possesses to divine if George has been talking smack about him later on.

"It's an idea." Especially when I catch sight of Stephanie Edwards sitting with Callie Torres on the other side of the cafeteria, and she's as glossy and gleaming now as she was first thing this morning. "It's definitely an idea."

_**Then**_

_It was a Friday night, and she wanted takeout, and he wanted somewhere to sit and watch the bay beneath the stars of the first clear night for weeks, and the two weren't mutually exclusive. It was progress, planning a date night, walking out of the hospital together like he wasn't nervous about being seen with her, like it didn't matter she was fresh out of med school and he was almost grown._

_The woman who met them on the corner had tight black curls and a buttery soft suede jacket that would slowly but surely be ruined by the dampness in the air._

_Jackson halted. "Steph."_

_And April wondered why that name was enough to choke him._

'_Steph' took a step forward. She wasn't an intern with mascara smudges under her eyes, so there was that, but she wasn't the one he wanted either._

"_Hello." She put out her hand, and her voice said _money_, and for all she was the reason he'd left New York, she was also the reason Jackson could feel April's hand already slipping out of his grasp. "I'm Stephanie Edwards ___–_ trauma surgeon, Yale alum, big fan of strawberry ice cream?" Her smile said _run_. "You'll have to fill me in on your dessert preferences, since all I know about you for sure is that you're the woman who's been banging my boyfriend."_

_**Now**_

Lexie jerks her chin towards Stephanie. "You need me to kill her?"

I watch the woman who's boyfriend I'd been 'banging' squirt lemon juice over the cubes of fancy foreign cheese in her salad, and take a big gulp of my shake. "It's not her fault," I point out.

"She cheated."

"And he left without saying anything, and then he cheated."

And I spent the past couple of months letting a guy a met in the bar unwrap me layer by layer while Matthew fixed cars and iced cakes and worked his ass off as a volunteer paramedic on the weekends.

"It's nobody's fault."

"It's definitely not _your_ fault," Lexie says robustly. "And I let him have the last waffle this one time –"

"He does love waffles."

"And he only said thank you _after he'd already taken a bite._" She purses her lips, which doesn't make her any less pretty, but which does make me laugh. Mark Sloan is sitting two tables away, pretending not to notice that Lexie's sitting two tables away, pulling faces, and not doing a very good job. There are bets on how long it's going to take Lexie to join in with his banter (which is only playful instead of barbed when it's with her), for it to click in that big brain of hers that he's not correcting her suture technique because there's actually anything to correct. She's trying to be all about the medicine, but sometimes she jumps if she hears his voice before she realises he's behind her, and I'm pretty sure he's going to make 'all about the medicine' pretty much impossible before long.

George shakes his head back and forth like he can't understand how I could bring such an immoral person into our home. He's finished the banana and moved onto a cup of pudding, so his silence doesn't seem all that weird until I remember he's scrubbing in with Jackson this afternoon.

I can recite the procedure for corrective lower jaw surgery, the kind they're doing today, point-by-point. They'll work from the inside of the mouth, separating the anterior and posterior portions of the jaw, detaching the front of the jaw via a lateral incision so the palate can move as a whole. Then, with tiny, delicate movements, the jaw will be manoeuvred into its new position and fastened with stabilisation screws, and possibly plates. It's an easy fix, with the added thrill of bone saws and diamond-edged files, and I deserve this surgery. I don't want it (or I don't _want_ to want it, which is worse), and it's so far below Jackson's level that this can only be a patient he's bonded with, or a patient who couldn't afford him otherwise, or (and I hate myself for hating it) a patient his girlfriend asked him to take on – and if it were either of the other two, George wouldn't keep shovelling food into his mouth as an excuse not to talk to me.

And that's why I follow him, abandoning my own pudding cup.

"The patient is now four weeks post-trauma, but the mandible is healing incorrectly, which is why –"

Which is why annoyingly gorgeous Stephanie's annoyingly gorgeous friend's lower jaw juts out in front of her upper, why she's maybe two whole points less gorgeous. I've read the chart, and we all saw the news reports: her boyfriend beat her bloody, so she beat him halfway to brain damage. The judge threw the barely raised an eyebrow at her, and Jo Wilson got off with anger management classes, community service, and enough crowd-sourced donations to pay for _ten_ mandible osteotomies, let alone this one quick fix.

"Doctor Kepner?" Stephanie breaks off her conversation with George to shoot me an enquiring look over his shoulder. "Did you want something?"

"Kepner?" That's Jo Wilson, and there's a light in her (maybe one whole point less gorgeous) hazel eyes. "You're Kepner?"

"Yep. That's me. April Kepner. The one and only."

She sits up straighter in bed, cocking her head to one side. "Huh." She squints at me, but not because her contacts fell out. "_Huh_."

Sometimes, I forget I'm infamous.

"Jo." Stephanie's voice is carefully modulated. Everything about her is carefully modulated, actually, which along with the fancy foreign cheese consumption and apparently bare-faced beauty and the gloss and the gleam, is another thing about her I'm not trying to emulate (because who wants to be perfect when you can eat your bodyweight in popcorn and watch Titanic three times in one night, right?) "I cheated, so he cheated. It's not even about Doctor Kepner. It's okay."

If it's not even about me, why do I feel like I'm about to throw up in the trashcan?

"_Huh_," says Jo again.

I throw up in the trashcan.

"Well, _great_." Stephanie Edwards isn't so carefully modulated now, not that I honestly care. All I care about is George's cool hands on my forehead, checking my temperature, pulling back my hair.

"No fever," he reports to the last woman in the world who needs to see me throwing up in a trashcan.

Bourbon has become my friend over the past few weeks (post-discovery my boyfriend was a cheating cheater who cheated), and the number of people who've seen me throwing up in various receptacles has gone up accordingly, but _his_ girlfriend seriously did not need to see me throwing up in a trashcan. For Reed and Lexie, it was at least educational, and know they know I usually start croaking like a frog before I'm going to hurl, which is great for their future reference. For Stephanie, it's just another point in her favour; I don't think she could throw up in a trashcan even if she tried.

"Young love," Jo Wilson puts in cheerfully, not that I honestly care, or would cheerfully take a bone saw to her right this minute. "Isn't it wonderful?"

_**~#~**_

I'm not pregnant. Everybody but me thought I was pregnant, but it was me who turned out to be right, so chalk one up for me on the board of 'Things April Got Right'. I got one thing right, after washing my mouth out three times, taking down an entire packet of gum, and lying down in the ourth floor on-call room for an hour, staring at the wall and willing myself to be right. Getting pregnant would most definitely not be a thing I got right, because babies shouldn't have liars for fathers and stupid-heads for mothers, and because any connection with Jackson stronger than the single thread still holding us together (never mind 'I can't') would hurt too much. I'm pathetic, because I waste my hour twanging that thread, that thread attached to my heart, like if I do it enough then the bleeding will stop, the wound will close, and I won't roll out of bed and end up on top of Julia Child anymore. The least my body and my mind could do would be to make this blue, moody, miserable, past tense, instead of red, bright, hot, present and incorrect. If I focus on it hard enough, the ache is awful enough to make me shake, to beam out the agony in waves.

Unlike waves, though, it doesn't come and go, and also, that metaphor was about sound waves, so, like my ability to keep the contents of my stomach locked up inside, everything's kind of fallen apart.

_Is_ falling apart, I mean.

"Can I come in?"

And I almost summon the strength to say no.

I get as far as not replying, but Jackson comes in anyway. He closes the door and stands in front of it, folds his arms. If he crossed his ankles, it could almost be this morning all over again. Like this morning, he waits for me to go first, to explain myself – it's not anything he does, really, but there's something about his silence. I consider playing chicken, waiting him out, and study his lack of expression like that might clue me in on what to do. It doesn't. There's something about Jackson's silence, and the hard line of his jaw, and his compressed lips, and there's something so teacher-like about it that I can't stand. I can't stand him being so good at being professional, and cut off, and closed off, when every emotion I ever experience spreads itself over my face like butter over bread.

I wish I knew what he was thinking.

"I'm okay." I fold my arms likewise. "It's something I ate, or didn't eat, and I know you're only here because somebody's told you it's something else, but it's not something else, okay? So you can go, you don't have to –" Stay? Care? Stand there like a block of wood when I'm ninety-nine percent sure you sniffed my hair this morning?

"April." He takes another step into the room (which is strange behaviour from someone who _can't_, or, more likely, someone who _won't_), clears his throat. "Do you want in on Jo Wilson's surgery? Because I could always –"

"That's George's surgery, Jackson."

"And he would trade if I asked him to."

That smacks of authority, and I don't like it.

"So don't ask him."

"I'm worried about you."

"So don't worry about me."

"I can't." The smile he offers is apologetic, and I bring my arms in closer to my body, crushing my fingers against my sides to protect myself from that smile (or possibly that smile from me). "I know we're not…" Together. Apart. Happy. Sad. "But I'm not going to stop caring about you. That's my privilege."

And that smacks of chivalry, of the mother who raised him to open doors for women and to respect their independence all in the same breath, and I hate it.

"You want me in Jo Wilson's surgery so you have first-hand evidence that I'm alright, that you didn't break me." My words are bitter; unconsciously, I raise one hand to cover the Band-Aid on my forehead. I stand up, even though we're nowhere near the same height, because he feels less and I feel stronger when I'm on my feet and at least as tall as I can be. "Not because you've suddenly realised that in a ridiculous attempt to impress your girlfriend with just how mature you are, just how over me you are, you've screwed yourself out of the only intern who could assist with a corrective mandibular surgery in her sleep, without studying, without first freaking out and inhaling three cups of pudding. Yay for Doctor Avery and his saviour complex!" I forget the Band-Aid long enough to give him a tiny round of applause. "I'm not alright, you did break me, and it's not your privilege anymore. If you can't, then don't. Don't ask, don't worry, don't care."

Temper flares behind Jackson's eyes, making them keener, greener. "I'm your attending, Kepner."

"Oh, nuts to that! Don't check up on me and call me April, then expect me to treat you like my teacher. Teach me something worth learning first."

He just looks at me. It's a long, steady look, and there's nothing loving or even particularly liking about it – but he strips me down to bareness with that long, steady look, down to my core, down to the part of me that couldn't say no to his knock. He did teach me something worth learning once, and I let him.

"Do _not_."

Because maybe he can't, but he might, and I'll let him if he keeps looking at me like he did that first time, like he did every time after.

"Surgery starts in an hour."

"I won't be there."

And I'm not – at least, I'm sort of not.

I sit down beside Lexie, who wordlessly offers me a French fry. She's stress eating, most likely because I lost my lunch and she thought I was going to be an unwed mother, and tomorrow morning she's going to make puppy dog eyes at me so I'll go running with her, and then I'll have a heart attack and die from a combination of not being an athlete and not being a morning person, and she'll end up eating more French fries, and the cycle will continue.

"I'm here for George," I announce.

"Uh-huh."

He's scanning the gallery, making sure we're here to share in whatever follows, win or lose. His gloved hand wiggles slightly, and while Lexie waves, I go right up to the glass and lay my palm against it. I pretend George and I are in a Disney movie, that we're destined to fall in love with one another, that any moment now we're going to burst into song about it. If George didn't have all the appeal to me of a rutabaga, he'd be fun to fall in love with.

But when he turns away, I don't move.

To anyone else, it would seem accidental, and it probably is…but I blink, and the scene is still the same: Jackson's hand is pressed flat to the instrument tray, like he's practising palming off scalpels, but no surgeon capable of restoring Jo Wilson's minus two face to its plus twenty-two perfection needs that kind of practice. He doesn't move either, and for a second or so we're connected – down there, up here – and the glass between us feels warm to the touch.

I knew it was going to be a bad day.


	2. Young Blood

**2. Young Blood**

"Hi."

"H –" The wires were only taken out of her jaw a little while ago, and the pain catches her by surprise – but this is Jo Wilson, though, who practically tore off the arm attached to the hand that hit her. She's tough.

Jo blinks, shakes her head, manages to sigh the word without actually moving her lips. "_Hi_."

"Let me get you some water."

She makes a retching sound as the liquid hits the back of her throat, but her airway is clear, and her hand wraps firmly around mine when she's had enough. I put the pink plastic cup back on the nightstand, and she taps her chin with one finger. Her eyebrows ask the question she can't, not quite yet.

"Well," I tell her. "Really well."

It's late, and the flow of people through the halls like blood through arteries has slowed to a trickle. Other than the beeping of the monitor and the occasional _swish_ of a door opening or closing nearby, the room has the hushed atmosphere of a chapel. I feel peaceful here, which is why I volunteered to stay and give Jo her post-of instructions and sent George, King of Corrective Jaw Surgery, off to Joe's with Lexie and the others. Jo Wilson is clearly not a person who enjoys silence, so I pull my chair closer to her bed.

"I'm sure none of this is new to you, but I still have to go through it one more time: you're on a liquid only diet for at least two weeks, after which time Doctor Avery will assess you; if he agrees, you can then move on to soft foods, but you can't bite down properly for a month. After a month, you'll be assessed again to see how the healing's progressing. You still won't be able to do certain sports, like –"

She closes her eyes while I talk, and the small lines in her forehead smooth out. She's not that much older than I am, but her boyfriend broke her jaw, and the E.R. in Tacoma didn't set it properly, so it's going to be soup and puréed treats for the foreseeable future. I wonder about her favourite foods, how easy they'd be to liquefy. I wonder who would know.

The door slides open in my periphery, making its own quiet _swish_. My patient doesn't stir.

"How's she doing?" Doctor Grey must be heading home for the night, because her hair is free from its usual ponytail, spread across her shoulders. Her lavender shirt tents slightly at the front, following the contour of a soft but undeniable curve.

"Vitals are normal, pupils are responsive, there's no obvious bleeding or excessive drooling."

"Good. Good."

Meredith Grey, 'Medusa', is terrifying when she wants to be. She owns the house I live in, along with Lexie, her half-sister, George, Reed, and Charles (that is, whenever Charles makes it home from the dermatology floor, where his current project is sleeping with every last female practitioner, nurse, administrator and out-patient with the kind of focus that's as disgusting to me as it is admirable to the other male interns). Grey is a perfectionist, general surgeon variety, and she's four and a half months pregnant. Her eyes are slightly feline in shape and colour, and I suspect she's cold to the touch. I don't really understand her, but I still want to be like her, and to be married to a neurosurgery _god_ (there may or may not be an underground Doctor Derek Shepherd fan club, and I may or may not be its official secretary), and juggle marriage and children and medicine and everything that life has to offer.

"Karev's going to come sit with her." She announces this suddenly, without preamble or explanation, which is a thing she does. "He's been back from Africa less than a month, he could use the practice."

"Speaking to patients?"

"Speaking English." Doctor Grey shifts her weight from one foot to the other, and something pops as she arches her back. "So you can get out of here – unless the reason you're still here is because you're scared you might run into your boyfriend at Joe's."

"He's not my boyfriend. I don't have a boyfriend." Except I do, technically. Technically, I have a fiancé I haven't seen since Christmas, even though I reply to his emails the same day as they arrive, even though I soak up the details he tells me about home, about what colour the corn in the fields is and who's sitting out on whose porch when it's warm and what's gone wrong with his truck this week. It's been hours since the trashcan incident, but I'm nauseous again; nothing like cheating on a good man with one you don't even understand. "I don't mind sitting with her."

When she speaks again, her voice is quieter than I expect it to be. "He's in the attendings' lounge."

"What?"

Grey widens her cat's eyes at me. "Avery. He's in the attendings' lounge catching up on paperwork, not at the bar. I have no idea where _she_ –" She means Stephanie. "Is, but he's there, and my guess is he's going to be there all night. Go get drunk with your fellow morons, Kepner."

"I'll stay until Karev gets here."

"You're get _you're _being a moron, right?"

"Yes, ma'am."

_**Then**_

_"It's not a game."_

_Jackson had the sleeves of his sweater pushed up to his elbows, and his hands were raw from what felt like hours of scrubbing. April would have lotion – April always had lotion, which was why she always smelled of apricots._

_"You always smell of apricots."_

_"Apricots?"_

_"I like apricots, it's because you smell of apricots…and because you don't paint your nails, but you do bite them…and because you have really skinny feet, not small, just skinny. I like them."_

_She looked sceptical, or as sceptical as a person could look while wearing a blouse patterned with pink butterflies. "So it's not a game because I smell like apricots, I bite my nails, and I have skinny feet?"_

_"Yeah." He moved further into the locker room (not his territory), took her hand (not his property), closed his hand around it – because she was twenty-five, and she still had hope, and she made him hope, and that was worth holding on to. "It's not a game," Jackson repeated. "It's a woo."_

_"It's a woo?"_

_"It's me trying to woo you."_

_"Do you need to woo me?"_

_They hadn't had sex since that first night, which wasn't the reason why he'd decided to at least try to express how he felt (but it was there, and it did matter). She'd smelled of apricots then, when he'd felt her toes curling against his calf._

_"I want to woo you."_

_**Now**_

I get home before George and Lexie, and Reed immediately drops a plate of waffles into my lap. "You skipped breakfast," is her excuse. I add syrup and bacon, and then I recap my day for her. Reed is growing out her pixie cut, so she ties back her hair in a stubby, inch long ponytail while I talk, squeezing globules of syrup onto her fingertips and sucking them clean once she's done. She doesn't have time to eat before she goes to work tonight. "So Pretty Boy's pretty girl –" _Lick_. "Has a pretty friend –" _Lick_. "Who's not your patient –" _Lick_. "But you still stayed late to sit with her?" She shakes her head, then sticks her whole pinkie into her mouth and sucks thoughtfully. When she pulls it out, she remarks, "You're an idiot."

"Thanks!"

"You know what I mean! Your bedside manner is, like, fantastic, but you have this thing where you get too committed to people who have other people who should be committed to them!" She gives me a meaningful look, which I ignore. "And while we're on that topic, how are our delusional fantasies about plastic surgeon studs who dump their girlfriends at the exact same moment that our fiancé decides to run away to Guatemala?"

"You have your syrup slurping, I have my delusions."

She laughs. "Whatever. Can I take your car? I forgot to take mine to the gas station."

"I can fill it up before I go to bed," I offer.

"Curious George is off tomorrow, he can do it."

"Curious George is a _monkey_, Reed."

"Right, a monkey with the libido of a freeze-dried nun."

Reed likes sex. I'm not judging her for it, it's just a fact: Reed likes sex, and Reed freely admits she's available for sex with whoever's available when she's in the mood, including our male roommates. Last time she heard the call of the world, George locked himself in the bathroom for a half hour, and had to be coaxed out by me, Lexie, and a bag of doughnuts. He has an impossible crush on Meredith Grey and a slightly more realistic crush on Callie Torres, an ortho resident, but she's either dating an army guy, or an army girl, or both. I kind of hope it's both, because that's way more scandalous than an intern and an attending, and anything that makes my love life look even halfway normal is good by me.

The lamp is off and I've rolled myself up in a comforter cocoon when Lexie eases open the door, letting in a chink of light from the hall.

"Are you awake?"

"I am now."

"Sorry!"

"It's –" Not okay. "What's up?"

"Mark Sloan said something weird." She pulls off her boots and flops down on the bed beside me, because she's Lexie Grey and she's had a few beers, and that's what Lexie Grey does when she's had a few beers.

"What weird thing did Mark Sloan say?"

"He said I was sexually harassing him – _me_, that _I_ was – all I did was _brush_ against him when I went to get another drink – I mean, sure, it was my boob that did the brushing, but it was an accident! My boob made a boo-boo!" I can hear her worrying the back of her throat with the tip of her tongue, a sure sign she's tipsy. "I wouldn't sexually harass Mark Sloan, would I?"

"Nope."

"Not even if I was drunk?"

"Not even."

"Then _what_ is his problem?!"

I smile into the pillow, glad she can't see my face. The pillow is so soft, so warm…Lexie's creepy throat noises are so soothing_… _"I have no idea."

When I open my eyes, it's too early, and Jackson is in my room. He's standing over me rather than occupying Lexie's side of the bed, but he shouldn't be here, and the jolt of adrenaline from waking up so suddenly is like a slap in the face, making my head spin. Did he shake me? Did he say my name? Why is he here?

"Did I dream you?" I reach out to touch his arm, but it's definitely solid, so I pull away again.

"The Chief sent me to get you."

"Me?"

"All of you. There's a rig waiting outside."

"Who's with you?"

"Karev." Maybe it's the bad light, or that I haven't put my contacts in yet, but he looks even more impassive than he did earlier (also known as yesterday). If he wants to be a Greek statue, fine: I can read between the lines easily enough. The Chief sent Alex Karev to round up the interns – Alex Karev who should be an attending, but disappeared off to Africa when his wife left him; he'd set up a school and a hospital there, but he still has to take his boards – anyway, the Chief sent Alex Karev to round up the interns, and Jackson…is as affected by this, by us, by his being in my room as I am. He recognises the sleep creases in my skin, and my cow print pyjamas, and I don't have room for him in my head or heart right now.

"What happened?"

"Ferryboat." He doesn't say anything else, just walks out into the hall (which is turning into a thing he does, like to Meredith Grey's not sugar-coating things thing), and I question whether or not I dreamed him again. I wouldn't dream the scrambling noises of the house waking up, though, or the sour taste in my mouth. I wouldn't dream Jackson would volunteer to marshal the entire intern class purely for the pleasure of thirty seconds in my bedroom, because it wasn't even a little bit pleasurable, and his tone of voice told me that whatever he means by 'ferryboat' is too big and too bad for him to shield me from or screw me out of.

I couldn't dream what's waiting for us in Elliott Bay.

_**~#~**_

A sunrise boat tour is one of those ooey-gooey activities that's too much for even my sweet tooth (and I want to get married in a field with butterflies which are released when I say 'I do'), but not everybody is like me. Not everybody should be like me, but this may be the one time when these people should've been like me, and stayed in bed, and not been more excited by splashes of pink and gold and the sunlight turning silver on the water than they were about cereal and coffee and the snooze button and and getting stuck in traffic. I wish each and every one of them had been like me, because now they're here, and so am I.

You could see the wreck of the ferry out the front window for a good five minutes before we reached the waterfront. We all stared at it in silence. We don't say anything until the ambulance stops, and then we open the back doors and cram together on the step, trying to ignore the carnage that's only a few feet away, trying to steal each other's body heat.

Jackson explains triage, holding up the different-coloured tags. He repeatedly snaps one name or another, including mine, but it's hard not to get distracted. The smell of fuel is rank but seductive, like sniffing a marker pen. The shouting, and the screaming, and the wailing of sirens aren't even slightly seductive, but they still add to the sensory overload. It's too early, but not early enough for the passengers who have blankets pulled over their faces. No matter how fast we scramble out of the rig, pulling on padded jackets against the cold, we're already too late for them

Alex Karev pulls the zipper of my jacket up to my chin. I didn't even notice it was half-open, flapping in the breeze.

"Go."

_**Then**_

"_Shock her again!"_

"_Kepner, it's __–"_

"_Why aren't you shocking her again?"_

"_Kepner!"_

"_Stop that! Stop saying my name, just shock her again, just – you have to!"_

_But when she'd made a dive for the paddles, enough was enough. A look had been exchanged, a look between the older and the wiser, a look that said he'd take care of it. It was him who followed her out into the hall. "Not here." It was him who all but dragged her, not kindly, not carefully, his fingers biting into her upper arm, into the deserted exam room._

_April had shaken him off almost immediately. Her lip was a ruddy purple from biting it over and over, sinking in her teeth as she tried not to cry._

_Jackson wouldn't let her go for long. He sat down in the doctor's swivel chair and pulled her down with him, ignoring the protests from fists and feet. Like a threatened anemone, she'd curled up into a ball, fitting against his chest but refusing to lean against him, refusing to be comforted. Her breaths were more gush than gasp, one endless stream, and he had to wait until it slowed._

"_Okay," he said finally, when she'd stopped fighting it, him. "Go."_

_Only then had April laid her head on his shoulder, stopped biting her lip. She didn't cry prettily, she bawled, and the damp marks she left on his dark blue shirt made the fabric black and slick._

_When she was done not being pretty, she lifted her face up to his._

_"Don't hold me, please. You're my attending, you shouldn't…don't hold me, please."_

_They hadn't had sex then, not in that room. When she appeared at his hotel room door, he was wet from the shower, and she didn't wait to be invited in. Her hair fell around her face in loose waves, and the two top buttons of her sweater were undone, and she dug her fingers into the muscles of his shoulders like she was trying to searching for something buried underneath. He was careful then, but not kind, because kind wouldn't help. She was the one who needed to be shocked, to be pushed until she forgot the patient's name, his name, her own name.  
><em>

"_Can I hold you now?"_

_**Now**_

Maybe if I walk to the water's edge and turn back, I'll be able to wrap my head around what's happened here. When I reach the end of the concrete, though, I find I couldn't turn back if I wanted to: there's a woman laying a few feet below me. I can only tell it's a woman because of the delicate wrists and slender gold watch – there's a sheet of metal lying on top of her, and a couple of long, heavy metal railings lying on top of that, railings that were meant to protect this small platform and the people who used it. She's dead, I know that, but she's my patient all the same. It's part of the job, blankets over faces, worst case scenarios.

I jump down, he impact of my feet hitting the platform ricochets up my legs.

"Miss? Can you hear me? Miss, can you – _oh my God_."

The noise she makes is tiny, but I hear it. It's muffled by the metal pinning her down, , but I hear it. My heart, still recovering from its earlier shot of adrenaline, burns as it kicks into overdrive again, and I shove my shoulder under the topmost iron railing. I have to bend almost double, and I soon as I start pushing, she starts panicking (as much as she can panic, by twitching, by moaning, by risking further injury).

"Hey – hey! Miss!" I grab one of her hands, fingers flailing like the legs of a pale, frightened starfish. "It's okay! My name is April, okay, _April_, like the month! I'm a doctor!" I can't comfort her and lift this thing at the same time, so I pull off the name tag clipped to my collar, close her hand around it. "You feel that? That's my ID badge. That says I work at Seattle Grace Hospital, which is where I'm going to take you, okay? But I can't take you anywhere until I've moved this – this goddamn rail, so –" I look down, and she's giving me a shaky thumbs up.

That right there is almost more than I can handle, but I have to. It's part of the job.

"One…two…" On 'three', I pull, which seems more likely to lighten her load rather than just shift it – nothing happens. I grunt, and I'm stupidly glad no one but this broken woman can hear me.

But she _can_ hear me.

"It's been a really – _uh_ – weird – _uhhh_ – week." I figure that if I keep speaking, she'll keep listening, and if she keeps listening, she might not die. This is as much a fantasy as any of my other Jackson-based fantasies, but at least those have never included probable massive internal haemorrhaging, neurological damage, broken bones and ruptured organs, plus faecal matter and spinal fluid leaking into places faecal matter and spinal fluid weren't meant to leak. "My ex-boyfriend came and woke me up this morning – came right into my room like he wasn't my ex-boyfriend, like we were – and I haven't had any time to – _uh_ – process that, because then we were here, and now I'm with you, and – _uhhh_."

The railing is moving, thank God, and it'll lift away if I can get my whole weight behind it. I swing my leg over, straddle it, wrap my arms around and pray.

"It's been a really weird week."

Then, I pull.

It swings up like a pendulum, slamming into my chest, knocking the air out of me. I don't care. It's off her, and she's still squeaking faintly, but all that means is she's alive. It's off her, and – it's still moving. It reached the topmost point of its swing over my head, and now it's going over. Its greater weight begins to pull on me, my feet skid on the concrete – and then it's coming down fast, turning over, turning me over, and my stomach swoops upward and the sky becomes the horizon as the railing flips, spinning into the dark grey, oil-slicked ocean, spinning me with it.

The water is so cold, it's painful, a million icy needles plunging in and out of my skin, paralysing me. I can't unlock my death grip on the rail, and it genuinely will be a death grip in a few minutes if I can't find a way to let go. My eyes are wide open, but I can't see anything; the water is murky, and the bubbles which slip out of my mouth are dark silver and only make my thrashing more desperate. Everything gets quieter as I sink further and further down, like somebody's put my struggles on mute. When I do finally free myself, when the railing disappears into the depths of the Sound, it's too late.

Too early, and too late. I hate irony.

I kick, but my sneakers are heavy, and I was tired before I fell. I've been tired forever, or that's how it feels lately. I go to bed aching and I wake up the same, and there's no question why, but I never had someone's shoulder to fall asleep on before, so why should the loss of it bother me so much?

My lungs are trying to force their way up my throat, anything for air. My mouth opens, wide like my eyes are wide, shocked at how this day is turning out.

The arm that wraps around my chest is hard with muscle. I wonder if I'm dreaming again, but then we break the surface, and I decide I'm going to die for real. Water pours out of my mouth and nose, and as soon as that's over I throw up (for the second time in two days, yay me), and another arm is slamming into my back, and every breath leads to coughing which rattles my entire chest. I pass out for two blissful seconds, and then someone slaps me across the face. I'm on the step of an ambulance, propped up like a ragdoll, and Alex is cupping my numb face between his blue hands.

"High flow oxygen," he orders the EMT, then wipes a smear of something away from my lower lip with his thumb.

"Where –"

"Take off your shirt."

"_What_?"

"You want to get warm or not? Or you can get hypothermia, your call." He's already removed his padded jacket, pulls off his scrub top as I stare. "Kepner!"

"What?"

"Take off your freaking shirt!"

I take off my 'freaking' shirt (I have no idea what happened to my jacket between _it's the end of the world as we know it_ and now), and Alex yanks me against him, which is weird, but not unwelcome. His arms are big, wrapping around my back and overlapping; I prop my chin on his shoulder, press my ear against his cheek. He curses. The EMT, a woman with tanned skin and cropped black hair, snaps the plastic mask over my face without batting an eyelid at two half-naked doctors clinging to each other in the back of her rig. The oxygen pours into my lungs like hot fudge over ice cream. Like metaphorical ice cream, I melt, and relax into Alex, who pats my back hard enough to leave bruises tomorrow.

"You wanna talk about it?"

"No."

If I talk about it, if I think about it, I won't be able to handle it. What nearly happened was real, really did nearly happen, and if my life is just that, just a single light which can be snuffed out in minutes, I can't handle it. I can't handle coming nose-to-nose with my own mortality while chest-to-chest with someone I don't really know, not with my voice distorted by an oxygen mask, not with my eyelashes crusty with salt_…_maybe not ever.

"Whatever," he says, and pats my back some more.

"Go," I rasp. "Go help them."

"I'm helping _you_."

"But –"

"You want your tits to fall off?"

"What –"

"Do you? Because if you get frostbite, they're gonna be the first thing to go, and then Avery will have to build you a new pair, which will be awkward as hell." He's French braiding my hair over my shoulder, which is also weird, and also not unwelcome. "Jesus, you're cold."

"Sorry."

"You should be," he grumbles. "Freaking idiot."

"April!"

I'm pretty sure Jackson doesn't hear Alex callngi him a 'freaking idiot' too, but we both know it's not that he's about to have a problem with. His eyebrows are set ina straight line, and his frown only gets deeper as he notices my wet hair, the mask helping me breathe, my bare arms wrapped around bare Alex. If this were any other place and time, the fact that he's jealous would give me hope (as well as pissing me off), but this is the least appropriate place and time in the world for him to be jealous, and why does he gets to be jealous now when he was patronising last night and downright Night Stalker-y this morning?

It's not fair, and he knows it's not fair (and it gives me hope)._  
><em>

I pull the mask off my face, half-throttling Alex with the tubing. He backs off, but doesn't look impressed with the choices I'm making.

"She fell in the water," he explains, not making eye contact with either of us. "I pulled her out." He wrings out his shirt, then changes his mind and picks up the oil-streaked t-shirt lying on the floor of the rig, a shirt which has most likely never been worn, only used to clean hinges and mop spills. It has a Coca-Cola logo on the front, an old-fashioned bottle top.

At first, Jackson ignores him, but his mother raised him better than that.

"Thanks, Karev."

Alex ignores him right back.

"Get dry."

"Thank you." I half-smile at him. He half-smiles back.

And then it's just me and Jackson, and maybe I should be ignoring him too.

"April."

"I fell in the water," I tell him lamely.

"I know." He sits down on the step beside me, but he's not Alex, so I don't lean on him. We both stare out at the ocean, which is still serene in spots. My hand twitches, braced on the metal next to his. If I stretched out with my finger, if I touched him, what would happen? Would he pull away? Or would his hand wrap around mine, the way it did before, burning the cold out of my body, the hurt out of my heart? Would we get to have a moment, just one moment, when it was okay for him not to be jealous or patronising or Night Stalker-y, when it was okay for me to want him? I can't forget he didn't choose me – I _won't_ forget – but I can't hate him forever.

We sit and stare in silence for a while. I put my shirt back on, finish the braid Alex began.

Jackson clears his throat. "There's a woman with your name badge."

"She's still alive?"

"Hanging in there."

"Then you need me." He's not going shield me from this one, to screw me out of this one. She's mine.

"I - yeah." His voice is rough, gritty with borrowed pain. "I need you."

She's ours.


	3. A Cold Wind Will Blow Through Your Door

**3. A Cold Wind Will Blow Through Your Door**

I believe in love – in the bigger than one person (maybe even bigger than two people), meant for each other, destined-to-do the-Sunday-crossword-together-for-all-eternity way. I don't believe that love is patient, or kind. I don't believe that love isn't jealous – I believe love is stick-a-fork-in-your-eye-because-you-so-much-as-glanced-at-another-woman jealous. If you connect with someone on such a deep level that you can no longer imagine your life without them, why be patient? Why be kind? Why would you not move mountains and ford rivers and ride every plane, trains and automobile necessary to be with them? Why would you not push anyone who stood in your way out of it?

Since I haven't murdered Stephanie Edwards and buried her in Meredith Grey's backyard, I clearly don't have the answers to any of those questions. Instead, I'm assisting her with Jane Doe.

"Belly's full of blood," she announces, sweeping the ultrasound wand from side to side. "And – crap."

"What?"

"She's pregnant." That last is smaller, softer, but with the same sense of urgency. "Generalised crush injuries to at least seventy percent of the body, multiple fractures, contusions, abrasions, her spleen's gone –"

"Left pupil's blown." Jackson's arms are wet to the elbow, red. "Can somebody page neuro?"

"If I don't get this bleeding under control, she'll be dead before Shepherd has even started scrubbing." Stephanie doesn't look at him. She's busy stripping out and reinserting IVs faster than her resident can keep up with her (plus deliberately not looking at him). "Backflow, I need a minute to replace the central line –"

"Steph –"

"Doctor Kepner." Stephanie raises her head. She was on-call last night, but her skin is smooth and glowing, stretched tight over her cheekbones. She really is beautiful, and he's watching her watch me. Does that count as me being the one who's being watched? "Jane Doe is at risk of losing a twenty week foetus and about to go into multiple organ failure, but Doctor Avery believes keeping this woman functional is more important than keeping her alive." That's not what he believes, but she's mad. She's mad because she feels he's undermining her in front of me, and if Stephanie Edwards is the monster under my bed, April Kepner is the monster under hers. I wish that made either of us feel better. "In your professional opinion –"

"Steph!"

"In your _professional_ opinion, Doctor Kepner, which surgery should be our priority?"

I'm stuck: if I agree with Stephanie, Jackson will think I'm a kiss-ass; if I agree with Jackson, Stephanie will think I'm a double-dog home-wrecker. I know what my professional opinion is, and I know I have a responsibility to this woman, this mother-to-be who might have been in better shape if I hadn't been so bass ackwards and clumsy. How much time did I waste? One minute? Five? I swallow down the sour taste at the back of my throat. One of them is not going to like what I have to say, but it is my _professional_ opinion –

There are already too many people in this room. There's no room for a love triangle too.

"With all due respect, Doctor Edwards, what point is there in saving Jane Doe or her baby if she's going to be in a PVS, and you then have to make a decision about whether or not to use her as a human incubator?"

Jackson's eyes meet mine, him at her head, me at her feet. He's not smiling, but the lack of contact is perceptible, pressing into me like a touch.

He turns back to Stephanie. "We'll work on her together. Shepherd can evacuate the bleed while I decompress the facial nerve. Kepner will assist."

"Of course she will." She drops her scalpel into a dish, peels off her gloves. Her movements are jerky, but by the time she's put up her hair, tucked the curling front strands back behind her ears, she's graceful again. She exhales slowly, breathing out anger, and I feel terrible for contradicting her. She doesn't deserve to be undermined by me, the intern who's in love with her boyfriend (but if she didn't want that, why didn't she stay in New York?) "I'll see you both in there."

_**Then**_

_Lexie Grey opened the front door, a wood-framed pane of glass as large and unforgiving as a mirror. She saw him coming._

_"Is she here?"_

_"Doctor Kepner is not at home to visitors, Doctor Avery." Her lips were so sucked in, he wondered if they were going to shoot out the back of her head. "You're an asshole," she added, almost as an afterthought. "Isn't it bad enough that she has to see you at work, you have to come here too?"_

_"I need to talk to her."_

_"Don't you have any other girlfriends to talk to?"_

_But Jackson wasn't Doctor Avery that night, didn't need more gauze or more suction or anything, really, just anyone (someone). To Lexie, he emitted pain like visible light, mean red and misery blue. She'd thought better of him, and she'd wanted better for him – for them – so he'd let her down too._

_"I'm in love with her."_

_Mean red, misery blue, and love, which even her quick mind couldn't assign a colour to._

_"Yeah, you are." And that should have meant better for them, shouldn't it? That should have meant enough for a house to fall on whatever-her-name-is, with her silky New York hair and her fancy New York glasses perched on the end of her neat Connecticut nose. That should have meant enough for the Lion, and the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man too. "That's what makes this so much worse."_

_**Now**_

Jane Doe's temporal bone is crushed, and there's spinal fluid mixed in with the blood dripping from her ear. Because of the fracture, she's at risk for facial nerve paralysis as well as intracranial haemorrhage, which is why Shepherd and Avery are doing this together. Edwards and Avery are doing it together because he owes her for what I just did. They're trying to make it work, but maybe if I could actually _see_ them trying…maybe. Maybe everything would be exactly the same, and it would still feel like I was being punched every time I saw them together. He briefly grasps her hand on her way out of the room, and _whoomp_, there it is. Maybe if I saw them not having to try, walking across the street to Joe's, his arm around her shoulders, casual together, casually in love…maybe. Maybe I'd still have to rinse and repeat and remind myself that they share a hotel room and eat lunch together every day, that they're trying to make it work.

"Kepner."

The nurse is snapping on my second pair of gloves when Jackson calls my name. I lift my head.

"With me."

Shepherd has her skull open faster than I've ever seen anyone do anything, removing a circle of bone, peeling back the dura, exposing the pulsating reddish, pinkish, greyish mass. The heart means life but the brain means feeling and thinking, learning and planning, moving, existing. Our personalities live in the frontal lobes, our memories in the hippocampus, our speech in Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Excessive alcohol consumption can lead to Korsakoff's syndrome, gyri are folds and sulci are fissures.

Neurology was my favourite class in med school.

"Ready for me?"

Doctor Shepherd nods sharply. Jane Doe's stats aren't good.

Jackson and I move forward together. He has to remove a piece of skull from above her ear to release the pressure on the nerve, and he's right behind me as I press the scalpel into her skin. Blood forms bright red bubbles along the line I draw. "Harder," he murmurs, into my own ear, against me. It's not how Shepherd speaks to his intern, and it's the elevator all over again, and it's not okay.

But I press harder, and he turns away to ready the bone saw. Stephanie's demanding more suction, more pads, then drops the spleen into a dish with a wet sucking sound. Her shoulders, which have been up by her ears for the past ten – twenty? – thirty? – minutes relax. Shepherd, on the other hand, is gripping his instruments tighter, and as Jackson finishes drilling, clear fluid runs down his glove and drips onto the floor. Why are her stats still dropping? He removes another circle of bone, reducing the pressure on the nerve. This piece, sitting next to Doctor Shepherd's on the tray, will either be reattached with screws or destroyed as medical waste. Her other membranes will just have to take over if reattachment isn't viable.

They've removed a large section of skull, and the bleeding vessels in her abdomen are being cauterised, and there's no backflow into the bags anymore, but she's not getting any better. I actually see it in her face, I catch her in the act of trying to slip away.

"The baby!"

Heads turn, doctors, nurses. I forgot I'm a nobody in here.

"The baby could've been tamponading the bleed, but then we went in, the uterus got shifted around, and maybe the baby turned over –"

"Kepner, get down here!"

Stephanie's eyebrows are sky high, but the hand that takes mine is only a little larger, the fingers only a little longer. She crams my hand into the warm, wet abdominal cavity, and I have to rely on instinct rather than scans or scopes, and let the woman who has everything I've ever wanted show me the way. "Find the bleed," she urges. "Close your eyes, find it, follow it back to the source."

"I can't!"

"Yes, you can."

"There's too much –"

"Come on, April!"

And I get it.

"I've got it!" The tear is minuscule, no wider than a human hair, but I've got it. "Two-oh-Prolene?"

"Here, Doctor Kepner."

We scrub out in slow motion. I feel like I feel every bolt of electricity that goes through me, from receptor to neuron to organ; I feel like I'm shooting sparks. The patient is alive, her baby is alive, I went into the water but I didn't drown. Doctor Shepherd congratulates me, laying his newly clean hand on my shoulder, and my heart actually skips a beat. I can't seem to keep it in time, can't turn down the roaring in my ears. I'm thinking about everything, and then Stephanie smiles a tolerant smile and squeezes my elbow, and then she leaves – and then I'm thinking about nothing, or one thing at a time, because it's just me and Jackson, Jackson who completed a successful nerve decompression and made sure Jane Doe could eat and talk and kiss her baby when she's born.

I see him see my sparks.

"I'm proud of you."

What I am is white with soap from my elbows to my wrists.

"Thanks."

What he is is proud of me.

"Welcome."

"You know I didn't do it for you, right?" I don't mean the save, I mean the surgery (and he knows what I mean). We both stare through the wired safety glass at the empty O.R., at the empty table waiting like an empty stage. It's safer than looking at each other.

"I think you did it because you're a good doctor." Jackson jabs the button with his elbow, and cool water gushes from the faucet, washing the suds of surgery down the drain, erasing the last smears of bloody success from our skin. "I think you did it because you're going to be a great doctor, Doctor Kepner."

"Thanks – again."

He's quiet for a moment, so I'm quiet, and for that moment, the only thing between us is the steady sound of dripping into the sink. It's that one thing I can think of, because one moment with him fills me up, and when I'm empty I'll lie on my bed and pick over this moment, and that is not fair or adult or anything, really, except greedy. I need more than one moment. I need more than just being whole.

The flow stops, and his voice is low, his words deliberately chosen.

"Am I allowed to wish you did it for me?"

It's a simple enough question, but Jackson doesn't do simple. Now I have to be simple, because something will happen if I make this more than he's pretending it is, and I need more than just being whole. I need to be a great doctor, and a good person, because being a great doctor and a good person today has made sparks dance over my skin.

"Dream on, Doctor Avery."

I wish they weren't sparks only he could see.

_**~#~**_

"She should have a name."

"She has a name!"

"Yeah, but until we find out hers."

"And you think we should give her a name?"

"I think _you_ should give her a name."

"How am I qualified to give her a name?"

The smudges under Reed's eyes are grey now, will be purple later. She's been riding the elevator from the morgue to the lobby and back again and pinning up pictures of dead people all day, and she must be exhausted, but I still don't think sleep tonight. I don't think any of us will sleep tonight, not even George, who sleeps like a log even on his days off.

Reed's lips are bloodless when she grins. I want to get her a coffee. I want to give her a hug. "April…Avery…at least we have the first letter down."

"Shut up."

"Adamson…A is a good letter." She taps her chin with the end of her stethoscope. "Alice."

I play along. "Amy."

"Anabelle."

"_Alabama_."

She giggles. "Arugula."

"Alyssa."

"Ava."

The heart monitor beeps even louder, her heart beating even stronger, and we both start.

"Ava," Reed repeats. "Her name is Ava."

"Until she wakes up, it is."

_**Then**_

_April. She had her head down, and her ponytail in the air, and her name was April. George liked April, liked her mile-a-minute way of talking. He liked her for giving him half her granola bar, and for tripping over in the hall. He liked her for offering to trade assignments with him, for selflessly taking on a pile of scut a foot high._

_"O'Malley."_

_George felt inferior around attendings, especially male attendings. He felt even worse around Doctor Avery, who kept frowning (though George couldn't imagine what there was to frown about when you were Jackson Avery, plastic surgeon), tapping his pen against the shiny surface of the O.R. board while he waited for an update._

_"Sir?"_

_But Avery wasn't even looking at him. He was looking, staring at that ponytail, at April gnawing on her lower lip as she altered dosages, timings, responsible clinicians._

_"Never mind."_

_Maybe nobody ever gave him half a granola bar. Maybe somebody should.  
><em>

_**Now**_

Jackson's dad didn't believe he could be a surgeon. He's Jonathan A. Avery, son of Harper Avery, and his son's mother is Catherine Fox – brilliant, beautiful, and about as likely to produce a stupid kid as she was to quit being a surgeon, move to Vermont and take up making jam – and he still didn't believe Jackson could be anything, anyone. At night, his arm warm and steady around me, his whole body warm and steady and present, Jackson would tell me how he could always hear his father's words through the ceiling: words like _useless_, and _spoilt_, and _'can't do' attitude_. He was a pretty face, an acceptable football player with decent SAT results, and that was it. It was Catherine's fault. It was Jackson's fault. It was everybody's fault, of course, except Jonathan A. Avery's.

I wonder if Jonathan A. Avery knows, wherever he is, whatever he decided to do after leaving his wife and his son cementing forever in Jackson's mind that he wasn't worth the time, the love. I wonder if he understands that words can strip flesh more effectively than a scalpel, that the man I met in the bar that night was built both from his mother's unshakeable faith in him (as constant as a Republican's faith in God or a Democrat's faith in taxes), and from the pretty-faced football player with decent SAT results shutting his ears to the words coming through the ceiling and becoming more than Jonathan A. Avery ever was.

I wonder this because, as I wake from an accidental nap, feeling like my head weighs a hundred pounds and my body weighs a thousand, someone is sitting beside me. My eyes snap open, but it's Lexie's face all squished on the sheet next to mine, not Reed's (and not Jackson's either). Is there must be something about the way I look when I'm asleep, or –

Her nose is just asking to be poked.

"Ow."

"Get your own patient to fall asleep on."

Lexie yawns, and the tiny bones in her jaw creak and crack. She uses her elbow to lever herself upright, frowns. "She should be awake, it's been hours."

"BP is a hundred over seventy, pulse ox is ninety-eight…"

"_Hours_, April!"

"She just had major surgery!"

"And she's about to have another one – plus a rude awakening, if you two don't shut your yaps."

Mark Sloan has done that thing he does (if Grey is blunt and Jackson is evasive, then Sloan is stealthy) and snuck up behind us. His intended victim is Lexie, but I still jump. He leans against the doorframe, his blue eyes piercing, the square shape of his chin and jaw reminding us that yes, he is attractive and yes, he is totally aware. "Kepner." He sounds sarcastic but stern, like we're the ones who've pulled an appearing act on him. "Grey." His 'yap' goes soft at the corners, but Lexie doesn't notice.

"Doctor Sloan."

Dissatisfied with our lack of awe, he strides into the room, white coat flapping, swinging his stethoscope off his shoulders. "How's the patient?"

"Stable," I answer, because he wants Lexie to. "Doctor Avery did the procedure perfectly, no complications. She doesn't need another plastic surgeon."

"And I don't need to hear you singing hallelujahs to your boyfriend, but here we are." The monitor is beeping steadily, but he still muscles in between us to check her heart, the colour of her nail beds. "Avery requested an ENT consult, so here I am, a board-certified ENT. Why he went ahead with the nerve surgery _without_ a board-certified ENT – a blind, deaf moron could see she's going to need facial reconstruction, I don't even – Grey?"

"Yes, Doctor Sloan?"

"Kepner is Avery's intern, am I right?"

"Right."

"Then…are you lost? Stoned? Stupid? What the hell are you doing in here?"

She glares at him; he glares back, down at her, and the fingers of his right hand curl like he's holding something. There are meant to be lines between us and them, interns and attendings, those who've reached the peak and those who are still climbing – and yet, Sloan cares about Lexie. He cares about her opinion, her shiny brown hair, her preferred specialty, which kind of juice box she's slurping on today, and he can't get his head around that.

Which is why he acts like an ass.

Lexie shakes back her shiny hair and leaves, which is not what he wants, not really. I pick up glaring where she left off.

"You're not fooling anybody."

"What?"

"With Doctor Grey. You're not fooling anybody."

"Excuse me?" Sloan's eyes, piercing though they most definitely are, look like they're about to pop right out. "What is this, Intern Backtalk Day? I don't give a crap who you're screwing, Kepner, or who you _were_ screwing, since you seem to think a couple of sweaty fumbles in an on-call room with a guy who has nearly a decade of age and experience on you makes you somebody. You're an intern, barely even a doctor, barely even a _human being_." My chin is up, but my lip is trembling, and if he keeps snarling at me like that, staring through me like that, I'm going to cry (and not because I'm afraid of him or because I believe him, but because I cry when I get mad, and right now, Mark Sloan is making me mad enough to slap).

"But you're not fooling anybody, are you, not even sub-human interns."

Apparently, being stealthy is not just a Sloan thing.

Stephanie's curly hair is still bundled up under her scrub cap, which doesn't surprise me. There are still victims from the ferry streaming in, patients and bodies, and patients who are about to become bodies are sort of her specialty. She shoots me another tolerant smile, the same smile as earlier (even though she has no reason to smile at me, or defend me, or even let me into her O.R.).

"You're into Doctor Grey, Doctor Grey doesn't know you're alive except when you yell at her, which is why you yell at her." She underlines the sentence in the air with her hands. "And yelling at Doctor Kepner for being astute is not going to fool her, or me, or Doctor Grey when Doctor Kepner shares this conversation with her later on. That leaves you as the ass who yells at interns, either for no reason or for being astute, which is what we're trying to train them to be – oh, and the ass who's not fooling anybody about his being attracted to an intern." She draws her lower lip into her mouth to bite it, which doesn't fool me either. She's thinking about the type of guy who gets attracted to interns, the type of girl who attracts the attending who already has everything.

Jackson never told me who she cheated with, or why.

Sloan huffs. "I'll remember this, Edwards. I'll remember this next time you're busting an intern's balls for no good reason. There'll come a time, and you won't be able to resist. They're interns, it's what you're supposed to do with them." And just like that, he's smirking again.

She rolls her eyes, he chuckles. She steps back to make room for him, and his arm brushes mine on his way past.

"I wouldn't want to be Doctor Avery when Doctor Sloan catches up to him," I say, for something to say.

Stephanie doesn't respond. She goes through the motions, checking the incision site, but it's easy to see her mind is somewhere else. It's not my business to ask where, so I don't (and if she's finding this silence as uncomfortable as I am, she's the one who's going to have to break it).

"Can I…" Her focus is on Ava's swollen face, and it takes a second for me to realise she's speaking to me, not her. "May I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"What did he –" She clears her throat. "When you and Doctor Avery were in the scrub room, after I – what did he say to you?" I've never known her to stutter before, or not to look me in the eye when she's firing a question at me, then cross-questioning me about my answer. I swallow.

"That he was proud of me."

"Of course." Stephanie's fingers drift over the IV tape, the tube, follow the path of fluid as it flows down to join the blood in the patient's veins. "Once upon a time, he – but you're so young, I forget you're so young. Of course he's proud, you haven't had time to be brilliant more than half a dozen times, and they can't all have been in front of – he was proud of you. Okay." She lifts her eyes slowly, stretching out each awkward moment of between. She's in control here, and this is her boarding school way of showing it. "But you're not pregnant."

I'd almost forgotten the whole trashcan-vomit nastiness. "No."

"That's – not good, because if you were pregnant, then he'd have to – what did you say?" It's hard to keep track of what sentence fragment I'm meant to reply to. "What did you say after he said he was proud of you?"

It would be better if I couldn't remember. It would be better for me, better for her, kinder to us both, if I had to rack my brains for what I said to Jackson and what he said back – but I don't, so it's worse. What I say to Jackson and what he says back are what I have to fill the hole with the ragged edges, the wound that won't heal, the pain that time won't ease or erase. What I say to Jackson and what he says back should be private, but this is his girlfriend, and there's an unspoken something there that makes me want to lash out, carve holes in both of them so I can at least be sure I'm not the only one who feels like this. They should be honest with each other. How will they heal, the cheater and the cheated, if they can't be honest with each other?

I swallow again, but my throat stays sore. I'm still recovering from the waters of Elliott Bay (that's what I tell myself, anyhow).

"I said thank you, Doctor Edwards, and assured him that my backing up of his treatment plan had nothing to do with him personally."

"Because it didn't."

"No."

For the first time, I notice her lips are pale, disappearing into the deeper tone of her skin. Her lipstick has rubbed off, and I have no idea how to be around her when she's not glossy and glorious. She's still lovely, obviously, will always be lovely, but it scares me that she's not as far above me as she was before. I can empathise with the nervous way she's picking at a hangnail, and I can't allow myself to pity her. She has everything. She's not a pitiable person.

"You're so young," Stephanie repeats. Her tone is gentle; it sounds like it's costing her a lot not to be condescending. "I forget you're so young. We went to med school together, we've been together forever, and when you've been together forever – well, saying things like that, the way I imagine you saying it, all stubborn and proud of yourself, is just asking for a fight. When you're young, and all stubborn and proud of yourself – I thought it was just that he was hot for you, at first, that he was dating you so he could sleep with you, because you're young, because you have that hair, because you're not me – but it's more than that, isn't it? More than maybe you know, more than maybe I should –" She pinches the bridge of her nose. She must be tired, very tired, tired to the bone to even be considering confessing anything to me. "It's the classic guy thing, _odi et amo_, on the one hand he _wants you _wants you, and on the other he idolises you and wants to put you on a pedestal and never ever touch you, but never let anyone else touch you either."

"But he's with you." I have to remind her. I have to remind myself.

Rinse and repeat.

"Could you _not_?" Her anger comes out of nowhere, and her words come out on a hiss. "Could you not make it so easy for him to be with me, and not be with me? Because I know he's trying, and I know I'm trying, but I don't get that from you. I don't see you trying to make all our lives easier, to move all the pieces back where they're supposed to be. I don't see you moving on."

He hasn't told her about Matthew. She's unaware that I have a parachute, that free-falling is my choice (my stupid, painful, possibly fatal choice).

I must be tired, very tired, and I must really love her boyfriend to even be considering confessing anything to her – maybe more than I knew. Maybe more than I should know.

"I'm getting married." I bite my tongue, hard, and my mouth fills up with blood. At least my throat isn't so dry anymore. "I'm not the one who needs to try."


	4. Lie Or Lie Awake

**4. Lie Or Lie Awake**

_**Then**_

_"Tell me about Matthew."_

_"No."_

_They were halfway to a bad joke – the boyfriend she had, the fiancé who didn't have her – and it surprised Jackson that didn't make him mad. Technically, she was a cheater, was cheating on Matthew just like – but Stephanie wasn't April, and it was April walking beside him. She was close enough that her white sleeve snagged on his, and they both pretended not to notice._

_T6hey turned the corner, she caved._

_"Matthew is…sweet. Kind. The perfect gentleman. I remember him asking if he could kiss me the first time, and it was _so_ old movie, so embarrassing that I said no. I thought it would make me look bad to say yes, even though I…" Her cheeks turned pink. "And then I kissed him, because I felt so bad for saying no, and after that, it was okay." A deeper flush, a ducked head, hiding behind her red hair._

_"But you never…"_

_"No."_

_"Why?"_

_April lifted her chin, looked him in the eye; swallowed. She was thirsty. "It's how I was raised, Jackson. It's what I believed God wanted me to do. I was saving myself – I mean, I was planning on saving myself – right up until the moment I wasn't."_

_"Why?" Jackson didn't need validation he was good at what he did, he knew he was good at what he did. He knew how to make her eyelids flutter, and he wanted to, all the time, and he couldn't for the life of him work out why. He put his faith in science, not in God – maybe if he could reduce it to timings and chemicals, that flutter of her eyelids, those small sounds she made when her eyes were closed, maybe then he'd understand._

_"I'm not sure."_

_Or maybe they'd be exactly where they were, standing in the middle of the hallway, brought up short by each other._

_**Now**_

"April!"

He smells like home as I hug him: like malt, motor oil, deodorant, old-fashioned, powder-scented bar soap, bread. I breathe in deep, inhaling his shirtfront, and his arms get tighter as my ribs expand, my lungs filling with nostalgia and oxygen.

"Matthew."

Matthew has brown eyes, brown hair, good manners which make him bend down all the way to hug me, make sure our faces are on the same level. Some guys like to prop their chins on your head and make a big deal of the difference – not Matthew. Matthew is tall, but he always stoops for me.

It makes no sense, but seeing and touching him makes me feel lighter than air. I should feel guilty, and I don't, and I know how wrong that is (but I also know how peaceful I feel, because I can always tell what Matthew is thinking, and he never leaves dirty cereal bowls in the sink, and he never makes me question my morals just by being in the same room as me). I look up at him, smiling, and he kisses me, smiling back, and even that only lasts the necessary amount of time. He never asks for more, never pushes me, never scramble my insides with a glance. It seems like we haven't seen each other in minutes, not months – because he never asks for more, and he never will. Nothing ever changes between us.

"How was the flight?" I'm wearing my engagement ring, and it winks at me as inch backwards out of a tricky parking spot. Matthew's wearing a plaid shirt, and his left arm has a burn on it.

"It went fast. I met this really great flight attendant, we talked the whole way over West Virginia."

"About what?"

"About you, about what you do. Her son's in med school."

It's Saturday, a couple of minutes past five, the sun going down and the city looking greyer than I wanted it to look the first time Matthew saw it. He makes all the appropriate noises anyhow, and tells me about the flight attendant (Judy, forty-three, has a son named Paul, second year med student), and I cover up the fact I'm not volunteering anything new by telling him what time we should go to the Space Needle tomorrow if we want breakfast before or brunch after, about the sunrise and sunset boat tours and why we shouldn't go on either, about every cliché thing in Seattle I've decided he needs to visit or do. Getting the entire weekend off work is nothing short of a miracle, but the last thing I want is free time where he can ask me questions.

We pull up in front of Meredith Grey's house, my house.

Matthew whistles. "It's beautiful."

"It is, isn't it?" I tilt my head to the side like the house is a painting. "I forget, living here – like with the Space Needle – but the hardwood floors are really –"

"April."

When I turn, when he puts his hands so carefully on either side of my face, I have to close my eyes. This used to be my life, the reality where we were going to have three children and he was going to open a bakery or garage, where I believed I loved him because no one had clued me in that real love, is like having someone crack your chest and wrap their fingers around your heart, and all you can do is hope to God they don't squeeze – and God knows, Matthew would never squeeze. Matthew handles me like I'm glass or china, like a gust of wind might blow me away.

His breath smells of peppermint.

"I love you," he says, because it costs him nothing, because he's not hoping to God I won't squeeze. "I know we've been apart, and you have your life here, and your hair's a different colour than when we first met, but those are just little things compared to this, to this big thing: I love you."

I open my eyes, and I try to love him back. The evening is dimming to purple around us, and I'm going to take him inside and cook dinner for him and whoever else is in the house, and then we're going to watch TV, and he's going to put his arm around me. When it gets late, he'll kiss my cheek or my forehead and head up to the spare room, and when it gets even later, I'll go into my bedroom, shut the door, light a candle, curl up in a ball, and press down on the familiar bruise. It's the only way – press down hard until the aching stops, because if you let up, it's going to hurt like hell.

I can do all that, but I can't love him back.

"Come meet my roommates," I say, instead of admitting the truth. "There's a pool going on whether or not I made you up."

_**~#~**_

George digs his spoon into mac 'n' cheese, the kind out of a packet. I made actual mac 'n' cheese for Matthew and Lexie and Reed and me, but George has a thing for the kind out of a packet. He gulps down half the dish, chases it with half a glass of water, and announces, "I have a patient whose spine is at ninety degrees. She's bent parallel to the floor."

"Oh my God."

"Seriously?"

"You mean _Callie Torres_ has a patient who's bent parallel to the floor?"

After flicking a pea at Lexie (and being reprimanded by me), he continues, "She showed me this comic, right, just line drawings, but the story was everybody has a watch that counts down the minutes until they meet their soulmate, right, and she asked me what I thought the world would be like if people did have these watches, if there were a way of finding out who you were going to grow old and die with." A bigger bite, and he asks, "Ever thought about it?"

I wrinkle my nose. "No."

"Why?"

"Because this is a way of finding out. It's called 'dating'."

"April –"

"The whole idea of being able to find out is so stupid! You're setting a relationship up to fail if two people already have undeniable proof – the watches count as undeniable proof, right? – they're each other's soulmates." I haven't eaten much of my mac 'n' cheese, which is annoying, because I love mac 'n' cheese, but the whole I-invited-my-fiancé-here-from-Ohio-to-prove-a-point thing is throwing me for a loop. "Falling in love is about discovering the other person," I insist. "Most importantly, finding out everything you thought you wanted in a partner isn't anything like what you actually want – what if, aged sixteen, you decided a Justin Timber-like was the only one for you, but your soulmate is the spitting image of Joey Fatone? You're biased against him from the start!"

"And what," wonders Reed. "If your soulmate is a burning hunk of love with eyes that melt the soul of every mortal woman in a five yard radius?"

I made the dinner, I get to flick the peas,

Matthew, sitting next to me with his arm draped over the back of my chair, lays his other hand over mine to prevent any further vegetable warfare. "Your coat is buzzing," he informs me. "Also, Doctor Adamson's purse, Doctor O'Malley's jacket, and Doctor Grey's jeans – no offence intended, Doctor Grey."

"Reed."

"George."

"None taken, and it's Lexie."

So much for my miracle weekend.

Matthew rides up front with me, and my roommates squash together in the back and squabble like fast-forward-ed versions of our children. He offered to stay behind (because he's Matthew), but I figure Stephanie (who's on-call tonight, but who often comes in early to straighten up what she considers _her_ E.R.) might be more inclined to let me off the hook with evidence of me moving on standing in front of her, wearing plaid.

George, Reed, Lexie (and Charles, who's appeared from nowhere like a horny genie) decide to change into their scrubs and sneakers before reporting for duty, but since I'm not planning on staying more than a minute, I head straight for the E.R. – and walk straight into Jackson. Even I can appreciate the irony as hot coffee sloshes out of the paper cup and onto my sweater, soaking the wool, staining the white polka dots brown. It takes me a minute to adjust to the sudden heat, to the awkward sensation of being wet, then to realise that Jackson isn't even acknowledging my presence, let alone apologising.

His attention is elsewhere.

"You're Matthew."

"I'm Matthew." Matthew folds his arms. "And the lady you just dumped coffee on, that's April."

"I –" Jackson passes a hand back over his head, through his quarter inch of hair. "I'm sorry, April. Are you here for – did Doctor Edwards –"

"She paged me," I supply. I step back, back into line, and Matthew immediately hands me a pocket pack of tissues. "But where are _my_ manners, not that I've poured coffee on anybody today – Doctor Avery, this is Matthew Taylor, my fiancé. Matthew, this is Doctor Avery. He's a plastic surgeon." My cheeks are aching from smiling so hard, when all I really want to do is hit one of them and hug the other (and even I don't know who I want to do what to). "Doctor Avery is an attending, he's my teacher. He's also dating Doctor Edwards, the doctor who paged me, the doctor who's probably already mad at me for keeping her waiting."

They're both still standing there, sizing each other up. It must be a natural guy thing, because if Matthew even suspected what Jackson actually taught me…I rub half-heartedly at the coffee stain, but this sweater is destined for the trash.

"Kepner!"

"Doctor Edwards?"

Stephanie marches towards us from the direction of the E.R., her heels stabbing into the linoleum – she's wearing a sharply cut wool dress, charcoal grey, and I feel warm with shame over my brown polka dots. – and slams to a halt in front of our uncomfortable little group. "Kepner, where the hell have you been?"

"The airport," I say slowly. "And home…and the grocery store?"

"Then who was monitoring Jo Wilson?"

"What?"

"Jo Wilson!" She snaps. "Post-op jaw reconstruction, you managed one night monitoring her?"

"Steph," Jackson interjects (finally). "Kepner wasn't even the intern on Wilson's case, O'Malley was – and besides, Karev's offered to monitor her. He says she'll improve his bedside manner, says he needs nurse and patient recommendations for the boards – and since she's refusing to stay in bed, or to stop hitting the call button and demanding beer –"

"Don't defend her!" Stephanie rounds on him, spots of colour high on her cheekbones. She's breathtaking when she's in a temper, and I've never seen her this angry before. I notice Matthew noticing (is all this for his benefit?) "Kepner is a surgical intern, Doctor Avery, an intern who shirked her responsibilities!"

"She's a surgical intern who, as you would know if you'd bothered to check the schedule before paging half the intern class just so they could watch you dress down this one intern, has the weekend off!" A muscle jumps in his jaw. "We're meant to teach them, not play with them!"

"Oh, so you think shopping for snow globes is more important than patient care?"

"If Kepner booked the weekend off –"

"Fine, then maybe what you'd like to discuss is not playing with the interns?" She folds her arms, nods triumphantly when he lowers his back down to his sides (Jackson gesticulates a lot when he's mad). "What a shocker, Doctor Avery."

"This is Matthew," I announce to no one in particular.

He leans close to my ear. "We should go."

"We should."

That merits me a whole second of the good Doctor Avery's attention. "Doctor Kepner, you're on Jane Doe."

He only broke away from a fight about me to give me an order.

"Thank you, _sir_."

Jackson flinches. Even when we got to be in love, that wasn't a game we played. "Enjoy your weekend."

"Enjoy yours."

_**Then**_

_Stephanie perched on the edge of the banquette, wary of her skirt. Jackson had half-expected her to put a napkin down before she sat._

_"You had no right."_

_"I had every right." Her consonants were crisp, knees smartly together. "You walked out on me, but you didn't break up with me. Someone from the foundation came for your clothes and your mother stopped calling, but you never broke up with me. Do they serve tea here?" If only her knees were better at being that way, and she hadn't cheated, or they'd never been at all. If only he'd never gotten the job in Seattle, or gotten it sooner. "I'm sure I've caught a cold from all this rain."_

_"It rains in New York."_

_"What's her name?"_

_"April." And she'd backed away from him, like he was dirty, like he was contagious._

_"So her name is April, and she's an intern…what else?"_

_"And I'm in love with her."_

_"You were in love with me too."__  
><em>

_**Now**_

I wad up my sweater and add it to the linen basket, knowing it won't wash but needing to believe it will. I don't blame Stephanie for yelling at me, Stephanie who was worried about a friend, but she wasn't herself tonight. If pulling Matthew out of Ohio like a white rabbit out of a hat isn't enough to absolve me, what will? Stephanie Edwards is passive-aggressive, old money, a woman of colour raised in a world of WASPs. She doesn't do outbursts, and she'd never normally give me the satisfaction of seeing her and Jackson at odds.

When I go back into the kitchen, Matthew's shaping a ball of dough into a loaf. When I went to change my shirt, he was still up to his elbows in goo; he'll be a good baker slash mechanic someday, if there's ever a job title with room for both.

"That was weird," he remarks.

"What was?"

"Doctor Avery dumping coffee on you, Doctor Edwards yelling at you, nobody apologising to anybody for anything. Does that happen often?"

I shrug. "I'm an intern."

He quirks an eyebrow at me. "Is that supposed to mean something?"

"It means I have to be rubber, so they can be glue." One, two, three, and I hop up onto the counter as he cuts shallow slashes into the surface of the bread. "Being a surgeon is like living inside a pressure cooker, the steam has come out somewhere."

"You're mixing your metaphors."

"That was a simile."

Matthew chuckles. His arms are flour-dusted to the elbow, and there's even a sprinkling across the bridge of his nose. The place I was born isn't the same as home anymore, but I still feel lighter when Matthew brings a little of it with him. "So they get to scream at you, and you have to take it, but you're okay with it because one day you'll have your own interns to yell at?"

"There will be no yelling!"

"Oh, there'll be yelling."

"Matthew!" And then I realise I'm yelling, and throw a dishcloth at him. He catches it, winks as he starts cleaning down the surfaces.

"There's someone at your door."

"No, there's –"

Someone knocks at the door, louder this time.

"You're coming too," I call back over my shoulder, the non-flavour of flour thick on my tongue as I walk out into the hall. "What if it's an axe murderer? What if you have to knead them to death?!"

Our front door is wood, with a glass panel in the centre that rattles when it rains. When the sun shines on Seattle (and contrary to popular belief, it does do that from time to time), it streams across the floor of the entryway, illuminating all the nooks and crannies I don't dust as frequently as I should. At night, the security light mounted on the outside wall responds to any movement in a ten foot radius, bathing the porch in pale blue.

Behind me, Matthew's steps falter. "Weren't you just with him?"

Jackson has his messenger bag slung over his shoulder, and he isn't wearing a jacket. He doesn't move when I put my hand on the handle.

"Can we talk? About Jane Doe?"

"Ava."

"What?"

"Reed and I, we…" I wish she were here. I wish she'd been here to answer the door while Matthew and I joked and baked in the kitchen, I wish she'd gotten rid of him. "We named her Ava. She deserves a better name than Jane Doe until we find out her real one."

"So." The edges of Jackson are blurred through the glass, misty against a backdrop of darker blue. "Can we talk?"

The lines between us are blurring.

"Matthew…"

"I'm gonna go wash up." He lays his hand on my shoulder. I twist my neck to look up at him, but he's gone before I can smile again, say sorry again, make nice again.

Instead, I sigh, open the door while ignoring the person on the other side of it, go back into the kitchen. Because he didn't have time, I slide Matthew's bread into the oven (he'd already set the temperature, which will most likely be this loaf of bread's salvation) and close the door with slightly more force than it really requires. Jackson won't make me question my morals just by being in the same room as me either, not if I don't allow him to. My knees won't fold, and my pulse won't race, and we'll be exactly what we're supposed to be: an intern and an attending, two surgeons with different scenery.

"I'm sorry," he begins while my back is still turned. "For Steph."

"Not for the coffee?"

"That too. I would've gotten you napkins, but –"

"But you were so fascinated by Matthew that you forgot your manners. I get it." I press my forehead against the warm oven door, shake my head at myself. "That wasn't fair." But I don't feel fair tonight. I peel myself away from the warmth, the security that Matthew's baked goods offer even when Matthew himself isn't in the room, station myself on the opposite side of the counter. Jackson sits down on one of the barstools, the one I like to sit on to eat breakfast. "You don't have to lie. You don't have to pretend this is about Ava when we both know it's about –"

"About?"

"About you and –" But nothing seems to want to come out after 'and'. "About you."

"I don't want to start an argument between the two of you."

"Then what _do_ you want?"

His lips form a tight line. We're going through the same thing, unable to be completely honest with each other but doing our damnedest not to lie. "I want to be there," he manages after another minute of silence, of struggle. "I want to defend you from Stephanie, I want you on my service more often so you don't end up wasting the potential you have to be a great plastic surgeon, I want you to stop running away from me every time I –"

"Running away from you? I ran into you!"

"That's not the same."

"You can't always be there," I point out. "You weren't the one who pulled me out of the water."

"No. That was Alex's privilege."

It's the way he says that, like we've somehow travelled back in time, like old-fashioned ideas of chivalry and ownership matter. If we were back in time, though, we wouldn't be allowed to date. He wouldn't even be allowed to look at me, and the idea of Jackson never so much as looking at me, even in an alternate timeline with high collars and high horses, makes my stomach ache (not that we're allowed to date now; not that he's meant to look at me now).

"From me, to Alex, to Matthew."

He's mad, and when he reaches for me, the hairs stand up on my arms. He pushes back my left sleeve and grips the inside of my elbow, not my hand, pressing the flat of his arm against mine. He feels cold, and his thumb drags over the thinnest skin, the palest, the place with artery throbbing beneath. If he dug his nails in, I'd bleed. If he reached higher, reached for more, I'm scared that I'd break. I'm scared to death that I'd bend like a cheap TV aerial on a roof in a storm, that fighting him means I'm weak, not strong.

My fiancé is next door.

"Let me go."

"Can't," says Jackson, then lower, deeper, rougher, "Won't."

I'm scared that loving him means I'm weak, and surgeons are not weak.

"You took something from me," I whisper (even my voice is weak).

"April…"

"I looked at you after, and you were looking at me, and I thought, this is it; this guy is it." I remember him propped up on his elbow, bare above the sheet and bare beneath it too. It's burned into my brain, like the way he kissed me after. It marks me. "I thought I'd been waiting my whole life for you, and there you were." It was a goodnight kiss: so soft, magnified by fried nerve endings into excruciatingly sweet. My lips were still pursed when his hand – on my cheek – and his mouth – on my mouth – broke contact, like they already missed kissing him, like they already missed _him_, period (because yes, it was my first time, and yes, I was _that_ girl, but when I got to be in love with him, when I got to let him change me, being that girl was okay).

I miss him now, because he's so careful when he pulls my sleeve back down. I drop my eyes, focus on a smudge of oil on the countertop, a shiny smear where someone wiped with a cloth but didn't follow up with dish soap. "Even when you were there, you weren't, not always, even when – I can't remember the last time we kissed," I confess, surprising myself, surpising both of us. "Maybe if when you had been there, if you had always been there, maybe –"

"Friday morning."

"What?"

"It was that Friday morning." His expression has softened, like Sloan seeing Lexie, like a guy seeing a girl. "I'd heard about this great place down by the water, that it had huge floor-to-ceiling windows so you could watch the boats go by –" We both grimace. "I wanted to have dinner, take a walk, see the stars, take you home and not think about anything or anyone else for eight hours straight." I can't react. I won't. "But you said you weren't wearing a dress, and when I said you didn't have to, you explained to me that your mother, while not dead, would spin in her grave if you didn't wear a dress to dinner if she were dead." I laugh. He waits. "I'd been for a run, and you grabbed the drawstrings of my sweatshirt, and you said I could have boats if you could have pork buns, and then you kissed me." The skin over his Adam's apple is raised and pink, razor burned. It's a bad idea to stare at Jackson's throat, but better than staring at his face.

"That was the last time we kissed," he concludes, and I, like an idiot, look up at him. He's almost totally impassive, apart from the eyes. His eyes are fierce, proprietary, possessive. His eyes say he would've found a way to look at me, even back in time.

"That was the last time," I agree.

I know the cost of kissing him.

_**~#~**_

It's going to be another bad day. I suspected it when I rolled out of bed (again), dinged my forehead (again), and by the time there's a dollop of soul-sucking, alcohol-scented sanitiser in the centre of my palm, I'm sure of it. When I kissed Matthew goodbye this morning, this Sunday morning, the Sunday morning of the weekend I was scheduled to have off, I felt like a cheater, and I am. I dreamt of the guy in the bar who drank scotch with no rocks and told me I shouldn't ignore him, so I'm a cheater this morning. "He could cut me some slack," I mutter, grabbing an apple from the bowl in the hall that wasn't there before Matthew arrived. "The least he could do is let me have my dreams." The apple is mealy, overripe, so I toss it into the bushes and grumble right back at my stomach.

The relevance of the sanitiser is that I have no lotion. The reason I have no lotion is because Jackson loves apricots, so I had to stop using apricot lotion (and Matthew smells of mint, so I had to stop using mint lotion too). The relevance of my being in the hospital on my day off is because Jackson mentioned Ava, and when I wasn't dreaming of him, of his buttoned top button,of his football player's shoulders, I was worrying about her.

She's still asleep when I lift her chart off the end of the bed, but it's early. Even without me and Lexie flapping our yaps, as Doctor Sloan would put it, she did wake up eventually, and he has discussed facial reconstruction with her, and there are even mock-ups of what she could look like afterward. They're all lovely, these three women, but it's the final picture which catches my attention – in black marker pen, just beneath the picture, somebody has written _Ava_.

I press my fingertip to the word, like it's the glass in the O.R. gallery. I breathe out.

"Hello?"

"Hi." She's groggy, and her motions clumsy, but she's awake. I raise the top half of the bed, pour water into the pink cup, raises it to her lip. "Hi, I'm April."

"I remember." Her voice is low-pitched for a women, but nice. Her brown eyes scan my face, linking the name with the voice. "You were helping me, trying to get those things…and then you were gone…"

"I fell." It sounds like an excuse. "Into the water."

"Oh my God." Low-pitched, but very nice. It's hard to know for sure with all the swelling, but I imagine her face must have been similar: strong, but very pretty – unexpected. Ava is unexpected. "Well, thank you. I'm sure you…" She frowns. "I'm sorry, my stomach…"

"Does it hurt?"

"Mmmm. Like cramps."

A woman well into her second trimester shouldn't be cramping.

Now I'm the one who's clumsy, fingers fumbling with the edge of the sheet. It comes away from her legs with a sucking sound, and at first I think her sutures have torn, but her gown is clean from the waist up, patterned with blue and grey shapes. At first, I think it's something I can fix. At first, I think the world – or at least, one part of the world, one participant in the world who never even had the chance to experience it – hasn't ended, but it has. It's ending right now, right in front of me, and I know I should know better than to cry, that there are things I have to do, people I have to page, words I have to say – but my world has been reduced to saltwater, to so much saltwater and such a sense of hopelessness that I may as well be back in the ocean.


	5. High

**5. High**

Medical school is the opposite of a surgical residency. When you're a med student, there's several feet of separation between you and the projector screen; all your patients are cadavers, so you couldn't hurt them if you tried; you're a neurotic former nerd aspiring to be ruthless in a melting pot of neurotic former nerds aspiring to be ruthless, so you all turn up on time (or earlier) for class, you all turn in your homework on time (or earlier), you all turn the other cheek to syphilis, the clap, and all their venereal friends because you, a neurotic former nerd aspiring to be ruthless, understand the importance of blowing off a little steam.

A surgical residency is designed as a playground for that kind of perfectionism, but real life is different from med school. Things rarely go to plan, and when they don't, neurotic former nerds do one of two things: they rise to the challenge in ways you never even imagined they were capable of (and are thereafter known at Seattle Grace as 'the Gunther'), or they revert to type and hide in a supply closet.

And me? I'm no Gunther.

I'm hiding in a supply closet while Ava's labour is being induced, while her body and a cocktail of drugs are forcing her to give birth to a baby who wasn't ready to be born. Her heart had already stopped by the time Doctor Fields did the ultrasound.

Losing a child must feel like your own heart stopping. I can't even wrap my mind around that level of pain, but it wraps around me as I lie here, on the floor of this supply closet, reminiscing about the smell of formaldehyde and how simple life used to be, only I made it complicated. The minutiae of everyday life used to freak me out – little things which were nothing like this, nothing worth lying on the floor and crying over. I never caught gonorrhoea, my freshman fifteen was more like a freshman five, Matthew and I wrote each other love letters on this awful pink paper I bought in a hospital gift shop when I was fourteen, when my Uncle Al was dying. What the heck did _I_ have to be neurotic about?

_**Then**_

"_You're beautiful."_

"_Matthew, stop –"_

"_You _are_ beautiful."_

_A swift, shy, peppermint-scented kiss on the end of her nose, and another between her eyebrows. April didn't like being asked before she was kissed, so Matthew had given up asking to kiss her and just decided to wait for her to kiss him._

_Her hair was long, brown, and floated upwards in long, electrified strands. She shoved her glasses further up her nose, shook her head at her boyfriend of three years. "I'll write, Matthew, all the time, and you can call me, and I'll call you too, all the time –" Impulsively, she threw her arms around him, dropping her can of soda. It hit the floor and bounced, spewing bright red liquid in every direction. "Oh no!"_

"_I'll get it."_

_**Now**_

All I had to be neurotic about then was a red stain on a carpet. All I have to be neurotic about now is a woman's being burned as medical waste before we've even found out her real name, and a coffee stain on a sweater.

"Should we get him?"

"Which him?"

"Reed!"

"I'm serious! There are two hims involved here, and you have no idea which him will help her!"

My friends are clustered outside the closet door, buzzing anxiously back and forth like they're a hive of worker bees and I'm their queen (some queen I'd make, curled in the foetal position on the floor).

"Don't get him," I mumble, my face pressed to my knees, but still loud enough for them to hear me. "Don't you dare get him."

A pause.

"Which him does she mean?"

"That means she wants us to get him, right? She's doing the reverse psychology thing you guys do?"

"'You guys'? Gee, George, thanks."

"That's sexist and no-means-yes-myth-perpetuating – also, _which him does she mean_? She can have Pretty Boy or Superman, but not both."

"_Superman_?"

"He has brown eyes and big arms, and you come up with his nickname next time if you hate it so much!"

They go quiet after that, and I keep quiet, all of us thinking, each in our own world, questioning how best to be a doctor, how best to do no harm. I already did the harm, and what's worse is I did it by not doing enough: Ava's facial nerves will work, so what she's going through will be clear on her face, even while puffy and purple, even with her bones clacking together in a pulpy mess beneath the bruised skin. I can rationalise it by repeating over and over to myself that Reed and Lexie and George couldn't have moved those railings without help either (but that doesn't help me, or her).

Their way of helping was to call, even though I told them not to.

Jackson comes in within a word, closes the door behind him and lays down beside me in silence. His eyes seem especially light in the gloom, and he draws his knees up, mirroring mine. We stare at each other, pale blue scrubs, dark blue scrubs, and I love him because he didn't even pause to take off his lab coat, which shows stains as badly as any cream carpet a clumsy high schooler could drop cherry soda on. I love him so hard that it feels like pressure building inside my skull, and our knees bump gently together.

"Can we just…" My voice is so sad. I knew I felt guilty – that I felt guilty as _hell_ – but I didn't realise I was so sad. "Can I not be mad at you for a minute? Can I do that? Can I have a minute to just be with you, just…" There's no need to ask, since he's the 'he' they called, and he's aware of that. Jackson is on-call when April's friends page him because April is hiding in a closet like a coward, and he's fully aware of that.

He runs his thumb along the reddish inner surface of my lower lip. "Okay." His other hand raises my hand, and he presses his mouth on the centre of my palm. "Okay." He closes my fingers around the kiss.

"Thank you."

We lay there, on the floor, a pair of Siamese twins with no physical connection, not anymore (not now I've pulled my knees in closer to my chest). If I had any spare oxygen to power my brain, I would wonder if he even thought about hesitating, about how cold the floor is, about grey dust smudges on his white coat (but since I don't, I don't, and he wouldn't anyhow). They paged him, and he was here, the way he told me he wanted to be here. Without meaning to, I've let him be here, added to the rose-tinted memory that this was the way it was. We weren't _always_ in each other's pockets – perhaps if we had been, we would've gotten sick of one another and called it quits, and he wouldn't have been here for me ever again. He is here, though, and time slows while his hand is wrapped around my hand, which is wrapped around that kiss, and when our minute is over, he speaks directly into my ear.

"Grow up. It's their pain, not yours, and you won't be a better doctor for letting it drag you down. Ava doesn't need you to hurt for her, she needs you to help her. Grow up, April."

"You called her Ava."

"Yeah."

"Your coat's going to get dirty."

"Yeah."

"Jackson." His name is practically a moan, an echo of a noise I must've made when I was lying close to him once, mortifying. We're taking turns to take breaths by this point, so his outs are my ins and vice versa. He looks like he's in pain, like I pain him, and shuts his eyes. I shut my eyes too, smell the peppery scent of his shower gel, and want to rub against him like a cat and smell like it too.

"Thank you for the minute."

_**~#~**_

"April."

Matthew, who's waiting in the cafeteria for our prearranged lunch date, enfolds me in his arms without asking what's wrong. I'm grateful, and not only because he erases the hot licks of sensation that Jackson left on my skin. I press my palm against Matthew's neck, against his pulse, writing over the kiss that was left there. I remember the flick of the tip of a tongue in the same place, the way it made my body curl in on itself a long, long time ago. It's so long ago, in fact, that the memory is fuzzy. I've decided it's fuzzy, and because I've decided it's fuzzy, it has no power over me.

When the stars align, and it's not raining, and I manage to catch the delivery guy before he leaves a 'sorry we missed you' card, I can make myself forget. When the stars are covered by clouds, and it's pouring, and I plunge headlong down the stairs in my rush to get out of the house, I can also make myself forget. On good days and bad days, I'm okay. It's on the in-betweens, on the days when I have time enough to stand still, it's on those days that I remember – but today was a bad day, right? Bad enough to forget?

Wrong.

I forgot while I was holding Ava's hand, while she was struggling and sobbing, while I was hard-faced and red-eyed like a doctor is supposed to be. I was the one who took the tiny pink-blanketed parcel away, and that was so indescribably bad that I forgot. Now that I'm washed clean, of blood and of responsibility, I remember. I'm basically climbing Matthew like a tree, and I won't pretend that the kiss he drops on my forehead comes from anybody else, but he is not 'he'.

"This really wasn't what I had planned for our weekend."

He smiles, tucks a lock of hair behind my ear. "You're so strong. You wouldn't think it to look at you, you being so small, but you are. You're so brave, April."

"Matthew. Stop."

"And beautiful."

"Matthew."

I wear contacts. I use conditioner. There have been several versions of this conversation during our time together, but he somehow always manages to takes me back to the first time. I miss her, that version of me, as much as I miss him, how that version of me saw him. I was _the_ neurotic former nerd, and more, the dweeb who hid in the stacks and cried when she got a bad test score. I didn't understand that improvement is a marathon, not a sprint, because all I wanted was to be perfect. I tried, with contacts and conditioner, but it took more than beauty products to teach me. Seattle Grace taught me. Ava is teaching me.

"I'm sorry I have to cancel on you now too."

"Hey, don't worry about it. I'm sure it's the first of many lunches you're going to have to cancel to do something more important." Matthew shoves his chair back under the table, hands me the Tupperware sitting on its surface. "That's a tomato plait with deli ham, and I put in some grapes, and a bag of potato chips, and some pudding, and I want you to eat all of it."

"You're wonderful," I say. I sort of wish he weren't, but at least it's a good day for my stomach today. "Do you have any plans for this afternoon?"

"Space Needle," he replies. "I have insider info on how to beat the rush."

Lexie's being weird. She's being tactful, which is weird, hovering a few feet away until I tear open the back of potato chips and extend my arm towards her like I'm the Statue of Liberty and the red and white bag is my flaming torch. Selecting a chip – and then another chip – she falls into step beside me, and we walk out of the cafeteria together (she was nearly done with her ice tea anyhow).

"Was it awful?"

"Yeah."

"Are the chips helping?"

"Yeah."

"Where are you going now?"

"Back."

She pulls me up short with a touch on my shoulder. Her bangs are growing out, and her eyebrows form a right angle with the tips of her hair. "Are you mad at me? Because if you are, you should know I wasn't the one who made the choice – well, we all were – and it's not what you think, or for the reasons you think are the reasons – and I really, _really_ want to know what happened in that closet later, but for now you need to know that we all chose, and the reason we all chose Avery is because he was only ever going to be a floor away, and the longer you were in there alone, the worse it would be, and Avery was only ever going to be a floor away, so we chose him. We chose him for you, but we didn't, you know –" She lifts one shoulder. "_Choose him for you_. It's not the same."

And I appreciate that. I appreciate the difference. I appreciate my helpful friends, and Lexie in particular.

"It's fine. Look, I have to go, I have to get back to Ava."

"Sure you're not mad at me? Or George? Or Reed?"

"Sure."

"Right." She lets me go, purses her lips, then snags the bag of potato chips and carries it triumphantly away on the end of one finger.

"Right…"

Sloan is back at Ava's bedside in a new, private room, her battered face turned towards the wall. By contrast, his face is smooth, showing off the professional compassion I haven't managed to master yet. As much as I want to hover outside the door and hide, I have to grow up. I lick the salty crumbs from the corner of my mouth and go in.

"Doctor Kepner."

"Doctor Sloan."

"I was just showing the patient some more detailed images of the face I'm going to give her," he informs me, not meeting my eyes. I wonder if he's not quite smooth enough for this tragedy to just slide right off him. "I'll wait a day or two to allow her to recover, but after that –"

"New doctor, new woman," I finish.

"Avery will take care of the fine-tuning after the initial reconstruction. I have a consult in L.A., otherwise I'd stay."

"Isn't Doctor Montgomery in L.A.?" I probe. Lexie talks about her sister's husband's ex-wife (I've accepted by this point that my life is pretty much a soap opera) very rarely, and only in hushed tones. She moved to the West Coast and became part of a cooperative medical group while Meredith Grey was a resident, and Sloan is tangled up in there somehow too. "Is it her you're going to be consulting for?"

"As it happens."

We both pull our heads back into our necks a little, studying each other – he's doing what I'm doing, having what he can rather than wanting what he can't, only flying out to an old flame instead of flying one in.

"How are you, Ava?" I go around the bed, and she smiles, lopsidedly at me.

"Better, thank you, Doctor Kepner."

"Ava?"

"Oh, Doctor Kepner and her friend Doctor Adamson gave me a new name." She flaps her hand like it's not a big deal. "Ava is prettier than Jane." She doesn't even ask about her amnesia, what her real name might be, what's being done to find out. A trickle of coldness starts at the top of my spine, and it's dripped down to the small of my back by the time she speaks again. "New name, new woman. Losing that baby was hard," she says baldly. "But she wasn't my baby, you know? I realised that as she was…but I'm alright, Doctor Sloan. I don't need time or space, what I need is to be human again."

"You _are_ human." Her blanket-covered thigh is perhaps the only place on her body that doesn't have something sticking out of it, so I pat that.

Ava looks up at me beseechingly. "You understand, don't you? You're a woman, you're barely twenty-five, you're beautiful – you understand what it feels like when a guy across the room from you looks at you _that way_, and everything you are, everything you are without even trying, is enough to make him look back? I don't want a face that makes people cringe, or pity me a second longer than I have to, even if they are my doctors."

"Okay." Sloan's voice is flat. "I'll reschedule Doctor Montgomery. We'll get started tomorrow." I glance at him, and one side of his mouth jerks, but otherwise? Otherwise, it's like he's forgotten we're here.

I've done harm again without even meaning to.

"Doctor Sloan!" I follow him out into the hall, hurrying to match his long strides.

"Back off, Kepner."

"Mark Sloan!"

He stops suddenly, turns sharply, and I almost run right into him. He's so much bigger than me, so much taller and broader. "Back off, Kepner," he orders me again. The warning is obvious: his jaw is clenched, his shoulders are squared, the muscles in his arms are tight with strain.

"I will not."

Then he seizes me by the elbow, fingers digging in, and marches me down the corridor to the nearest on-call room. I have about a second to realise this is the second time today I've been shut up somewhere with a plastics guru before he jerks around, and his blue eyes are cold blue fire. "_What_?" He snarls. "What the hell do you need from me, Kepner? Do you have an itch that only an attending can scratch? Is it your life's mission to irritate me, to share my personal life with my colleagues, to make out to my patients that you're somehow better than you are, that you know better than I do? What is it?!" My back is against the wall, his body is between me and the door, there's the mild zing of sexual threat women are conditioned to feel from men in every situation, better safe than sorry.

And I am sorry. I'm sorry for lessening the way he feels, for making it common knowledge, for behaving like his caring about Lexie is something I have over him.

"Don't give up," I say softly. "On Lexie. Everybody thinks that they know you, that they understand what you would be to each other, and how long you'd last. Everybody has an opinion, and my opinion is that if you run away to L.A., if you get together with Doctor Montgomery, Doctor Shepherd will find out, and then Doctor Grey will find out, and then Lexie will find out, and you'll keep being pointed out to nurses as as the man whore everybody to watch out for." I swallow; being brave doesn't make your throat any moister. "I have to root for you two," I tell him. "I have to have you two become something great, because it really doesn't seem like that's going to happen for me, and I have to have some evidence from somewhere that love can prove everybody who thinks they know you wrong. Please don't go to L.A." He hasn't let go of my elbow, which is smarting, but I reach out, touch his other arm with my other hand. "Please don't give up."

Sloan's gaze is still fierce, but the blaze behind his eyes is hot now. "It won't make him see, Kepner. It won't make him change his mind."

"I…I'm aware of that. I'm prepared for that."

His grip on my arm slackens, and he strokes downward, along the length of my forearm to the palm of my hand. "We could forget about them," he suggests, the words like honey, sounding almost golden as they drip off his tongue. Mark Sloan is good at what he does, there's no denying that. "We could use each other to forget about them, April. We could try."

"You wish." But it comes out wistful instead of scornful.

_**Then**_

_The girl with the shiny, swingy bob cut had eyebrows that nearly lifted off her forehead when she was surprised. "You're sleeping with him!" She exclaimed, addressing the other intern sitting at the nurses' station, the intern whose chin was so tucked into her chest that she had no neck left at all. "You're sleeping with him, and that's why you get to scrub in!"_

"_No___…_"_

"_No, you're not sleeping with him, or no, that's not why you get to scrub in?"_

"_Can you drop it? Please?"_

"_No!" Lexie Grey snatched the binder April Kepner was attempting to focus on, china doll spots of colour and temper riding high on her cheeks. "That's not fair! Every intern here would sleep with an attending if it meant they got to scrub in on their surgeries, but there aren't enough of them to go around, and besides – it's not fair!"_

"_What's not fair?" April retorted, picking up another binder and holding it like a shield. "Sleeping with an attending, or there not being enough attendings for everyone to sleep with?"_

"_So you _are_ sleeping with Avery!"_

"_No!"_

"_Kepner…"_

"_Grey…"_

"_April!"_

"_It only happened once! Last night was –"_

"_I knew it! I _knew_ it!"_

_**Now**_

"Please don't go to L.A."

Lexie deserves a happy ending as much (and most likely more) as the next intern who kept my secret until stress eating got the better of her.

_**~#~**_

I'm tired but too keyed up to sleep by the time I finally locate George, who's frantically but ably suturing under the watchful eye of Stephanie Edwards. When I see her, I shrink back into the doorway of the E.R., but she waves me forward, her look cool and abstracted. Her nails are short, square, and black, and I tuck my raggedy cuticles into my palms and smile, because I'm pretty certain that's what my mother and Julia Child would want me to do.

"It was nice to meet your fiancé," she begins before I can, adjusting the angle of George's arm and stitches. "Didn't you book this weekend off to be with him?"

Of course remembers that now, after paging me in, and bawling me out, and pretending none of it ever happened.

"I did, actually." But I ended up spending the longest minute of my life in a closet with her boyfriend, because the best laid plans of mice and men tend to end badly when I'm the mouse concerned. "I'm heading home in a couple of minutes, actually, but I thought I'd ask if George needed a ride first. I can always stay."

"Doctor O'Malley?"

He raises his head, his expression apologetic.

"You're not going to need a ride anytime soon, are you?" I ask ruefully.

"I won't call begging you to come get me later, I promise."

"I guess I'll see you at home, then."

I'm folding my coat over my arm in preparation to hang it on its peg in the locker room when Stephanie clears her throat. "So your house – the house you live in, which is owned by Doctor Meredith Grey –" she clarifies. "Is you, and Doctor O'Malley, and Doctor Lexie Grey, and Doctor Adamson, and Doctor Percy, and your fiancé Matthew, all living and carpooling to work together?"

"Charles isn't home all that much," George tacks on.

"And Matthew's only just arrived. He did bring me lunch, though, which is something only _really_ good roommates do."

"Sweet," she remarks, and looks like she means it. One more time, I remind myself that it's not her I hate, only the idea of her, and the fact that without her, my life would be how it was before, with the exception of Matthew being in town and giving me guilty lurches in my stomach every few minutes, as regular as a heartbeat. She's been hurt, and she's still being hurt, and sometimes she lashes out when the hurt gets too much. I can relate. I considered having sex with Mark Sloan, after all, numbing my pain by having sex with a man I can't decide if I even respect. We all do stupid things when the hurt gets too much to handle.

"I'll just check in on Jo Wilson before I go," I announce, and a small smile curves Stephanie's expertly lined lips.

"Thank you, Doctor Kepner."

Like Jackson said, I have to grow up. Her pain is not my pain, the way Ava's pain is not my pain, but that doesn't mean I should go out of my way to make it worse. By going to see Jo, I'm tacitly telling Stephanie that she had some sort of right to yell at me and that she doesn't have to feel bad for being mad, even though she and I are both in cahoots about the fact that she wasn't angry with me about neglecting her friend's care (growing up sucks, but somebody has to do it, and it should probably be the somebody who was cowering in a closet just a few hours ago).

"I thought he was dead."

The voice coming from Jo Wilson's room is low, cracked with tears, absolutely nothing like tough Jo Wilson's voice. Because she's never seemed like the kind of person who shares, I assume she's talking to herself, but then I hear another voice. It's a male voice, a brusque voice that doesn't sound so brusque with the small noises of her crying in the background.

"He nearly was, but I'm glad he's not."

"Glad? How can you be glad?"

I peer around the edge of the doorframe, only to have my suspicions confirmed: Alex Karev is sitting on the bed instead of in the visitor's chair beside it, holding Jo's hand. Her perfectly symmetrical face is swollen with tears and post-op bruising, but I'm not sure Alex can see that. I'm not sure he could see her any other way but whole, the way he's looking at her now.

"Because you don't have a murder on your conscience, princess."

"I'm not a princess, you jerk. If it weren't for those people who donated that money, I wouldn't even have insurance, I wouldn't even…" She gasp-gasp-gasps through another sob, and I have to bite down hard on my lip in order not to follow suit and gasp too when he swings his legs up onto the bed, wraps his arm around her shoulders. Her head drops onto his chest, and she starts to cry for real, but Alex is there, stroking her hair, his bluntly attractive features lit up with purpose. He has her, I realise. He _has_ her, and I suspect she has him too.

My phone jumps in my pocket, and I thank God it's on silent. I wouldn't want to disturb what's happening in Jo Wilson's room, not for the world.

_Lease is about to expire._

Jackson.

_You in for another month?_

Grow up, he ordered me, and I'm trying.

_Are you?_ I write back.

_Yes._

_Alex Karev is in love with Jo Wilson._

_And?_

_Jo Wilson is in love with Alex Karev too._

_AND?_

My thumb hovers over the keypad. If I bite my lip any harder, it's going to bleed.

_Are you in or out?_

There's a plot of land overlooking the city and the water beyond, a plot of land I couldn't afford to pay to rent half of. Instead of buying it and driving home the difference between us, Jackson and I spoilt the plot together by buying a couple of square feet right in the middle of it. Every month, we each pay half the rent on the land, and every month, we would go there with food or wine or both, getting rained on or freezing and not caring that much. We haven't been there for a while now, for obvious reasons.

But Stephanie has no idea about our plot of land, and I'm trying not to harm her.

_I'm in._

But what she doesn't know can't hurt her, right?

_Thank you._

One more month, I decide. One more month, and it's over.


End file.
